Google Plus, Google’s last attempt at social networking failed miserably (in fact Google has unofficially sort of announced its death). But the tech giant seems to be trying another hand at it. The company today announced that it has started rolling out a new app called Spaces that will provide a one-of-a-kind group chat experience.
Unlike most chat apps like WhatsApp, Hike, Messenger etc, Spaces’ primary objective is group sharing based on any topic of choice (or just a general group). But the major difference is that other chat apps require you to keep jumping between other apps, opening links, viewing videos over third-party apps etc, while Spaces comes with everything at one place. In such a mess, finding bits of a conversation or any other information becomes a chore. To simplify all this, Spaces comes integrated with Google Search, YouTube and Chrome.
This means that if you share a video URL of YouTube over Spaces, the app itself opens the video instead of opening YouTube. In a similar manner, you can open any articles, webpages etc without having to leave your conversation.
Also, the app comes in with a built-in search service, thus if you ever want to find anything from an older conversation, all you have to do is type in a keyword. In case you’re searching for an image, or information about one, the service even comes with image recognition.
You can create a Space without any effort with just a single tap. All you need to have is the app and a Google account. To invite your friends to a space, you can choose from a variety of different methods including messaging, email, a social network etc.
And once you’re set, you can learn the topic of discussion that could keep changing by simply looking at the conversational view.
Spaces is currently being rolled out for Android, iOS, desktop and mobile web. Google says that it’s going to be experimenting with Spaces this week at Google I/O. In fact, folks at Google want you to install Spaces on Android or iOS before joining them for this year’s I/O for some sort of surprise.
