Google+ is dead again! The consumer version of Google+ may have been shut down in April 2019, but Google has continued to operate the service as a corporate social network, renaming it “Google Currents”. You need to pay for GSuite to use it, and only members of your organization can see posts, so this is for private company announcements and discussions.
Google Chat is one of the latest Google messaging apps. Chat was originally conceived as a competitor to Slack and then launched as a replacement for the consumer chat app Google Hangouts. Google Chat now also appears to be a replacement for Google+ as Google will “bring the remaining content and communities into the new Spaces experience.”
Google published a strange blog post trying to explain the changes. “Spaces”is the name of Google Chat group chats, but the blog post mentions “Spaces”- capital S – without a single actual mention of Google Chat, as if “Spaces”is a separate Google product. When Google announced Google Chat Spaces last year, it said:
With Spaces, we’ve turned Rooms in Google Chat into a dedicated place to organize people, topics, and projects in Google Workspace. Over the summer, we’ll be turning Rooms into Spaces and launching a streamlined and flexible user experience to help teams and individuals stay on top of everything that matters.
Google Chat Spaces also features prominently in the new Gmail redesign, right below the Chat list.
We will provide new features in Spaces to help you communicate and collaborate more effectively. These include supporting large communities and communicating with management, investing in advanced search, content moderation tools, and more. We also invest in search and discovery, app development platform capabilities, and enterprise-grade security and compliance, including data protection, data loss prevention (DLP), and Vault support .
So, to recap: Google needs a competitor to Slack, and that’s Google Chat. Google needs to stick Hangouts users somewhere – this is also Google Chat. Google also needs somewhere to allow Google Currents users to migrate, and now it’s Google Chat. Google Chat will require a lot more development and resources if it’s going to cater for all these disparate use cases.