Another tick on Google’s ever growing list of social networking failures. The company has now announced that it will be shutting down the “Spaces” app on April 17th. Spaces will become read only on March 3 before being rolled back in April. The app was launched less than a year ago as a way for gmail users to create small spaces that were invite-only, and could be used to hold discussions over anything under the sun.
Spaces was actually pretty cool and I am slightly sad that it is going away. However, in an age and time when there are easier ways to share content, Spaces perhaps came too late.
Speaking on the topic, Google product manager John Kilcline said:
Last year, we announced Spaces to experiment with a new approach to small group sharing. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about how people come together to share ideas and content around any topic.
Spaces was closely related to Google+ as well and indeed, parts of the app melded Google+ communities as well. Kilcline added:
As we focus our efforts, we’ve decided to take what we learned with Spaces, and apply it to our existing products. Unfortunately, this means that we’ll be saying goodbye to supporting Spaces. We want to thank all of the Spaces users who tried out the app and shared their feedback. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Well, this does make one wonder about where Google would like to implement the smarts it has gained from Spaces. Hangouts? Allo perhaps?
Google is known for launching and killing apps on a regular basis. However, the company seems to have a pretty itchy trigger finger of late. The company recently shut the classic Google+ experience, though in all honesty, it is a bit mystifying that the company has decided to keep Google+ around for so long at all.
Meanwhile, Google is not the only company that is shutting down side apps of late. Twitter for instance launched a dedicated app to manage business accounts, and shut it down this year. There are a lot of other examples at well. It seems as if these companies had been so busy growing their essential businesses that they kind of lost track of the side branches, the experimental projects. And now, they are finally taking the time to shut them down and to focus their resources in other places.
