New Google Spaces, Small Group Sharing App for Android and iOS

[engine]

Google has come up with a new sharing app, Spaces, for what it describes as small group sharing.

I'm not quite sure why this was done as there are plenty of alternatives already out there.

We wanted to build a better group sharing experience, so we made a new app called Spaces that lets people get people together instantly to share around any topic.
New Google Spaces, Small Group Sharing App for Android and iOS [googleblog.blogspot.com]

Added, I just installed it to check it out and it wants to use a Google account.
If Google had nade it without the Google account it might have greater takeup.
Who knows, it may go well from the get go.

[Andy Langton]

A 20% project, presumably. Seems to aim at the Pinterest style of user, or perhaps at Basecamp-style systems. It's rather close to Google+ in how it works (which is not a good thing), but if it does what it's supposed to well, then who knows?

[Robert Charlton]

Group conversations often don’t stay on topic, and things get lost in endless threads that you can’t easily get back to when you need them.

I've been looking for collaboration tools for a while now, and the above are indeed problems I'd love to solve. Things also don't happen in a defined sequence. Things get renamed. Focus shifts. Complexity increases along the way. Tiny little footnotes become new main topics.

I don't get much of idea from Google's mobile screen idealizations how managing any series of group conversations of any complexity is going to become easier because now there's a cutesy app with four picture panels to a screen.

What's frustrating is that they don't give you enough detail to know whether it's worth your while to take a deeper look. This is true of most online tools these days. It could be great, but they don't take the trouble to describe it.

[bill]

I just got an invite for a new Space, and it shows up in Google+ under Communities. However, my G+ account is under a custom domain, so it doesn't work.

[engine]

It's a shame about that because i'd like to try it without mixing accounts, and to test it with something other than a G+, which also has a different domain.