What a visionary reading! Today Google Spaces is discontinued.

It's... an interesting case. It frankly seems best for what Google indicates in the tagline - "Small groups". Useful for an entire office? Not really. Useful for scheduling within a small group like a few coworkers or a little suburban book club? It's a godsend.

Also, are you REALLY complaining about needing a Google account to use a Google product? Who cares? Most people in the target demographic already have one for one of the countless other services!

I see this as something of a hybrid between social networking and Slack, in a way that actually could be useful. There are many times that I've wished for a "Slack-Lite" that I could easily whip up for use with friends. Slack, as cool as it is for work, is just too much overhead. My friends aren't going to use it. Text message, e-mail, Hangouts, Facebook. . . they all have limitations or annoyances for this kind of things.

Google Spaces looks like it has the potential to fit quite nicely. The initial release is definitely missing a few features I'd like to see, but I'm feeling like there's a lot of potential.

Spaces needs a way for the moderator to be able edit the content, but automatically keep the old links with pointers to the new, in case anyone bookmarked the old link.
If Google gave away a new car every day to Spaces users I might try it,

Buzz, Wave, Sites, Google+ and now Spaces. Will they ever learn?

They should just give up and stop creating new products.

G+ isn't that bad. The communities work very well

Well John, if you had bothered to read the HUGE LETTERS of the first 3 words on the get.google.com/spaces that say "Small group sharing ..." you could have saved yourself the time of writing this entire article and ending with something stupid like "Now if you have a bunch of little group projects with different people needing to share a lot of stuff, this might work. "
But I suppose you need to get paid for something, right?

I think a lot of the confusion is in the lack of focus in Google Spaces' description. For me, it might be a great place to allow a small group to coordinate and brainstorm.

For example, two other people and I have to plan a meeting to be held in about a year and a half from now with about 200 attendees. We are NOT meeting planners, we live in various points across the state, and while email is fine, it's weak at best in organizing streams of thought. An application like Google Spaces just might give us the ability to bring together the various ideas, topics, and other components necessary to plan the meeting successfully. There are numerous Web sites that we need to reference and discuss, lots of images to review, and general discussion which, if handled properly, just might work well within the framework of Google Spaces. We'll see!

The problem with all these new products is getting people to change the way they do stuff to adopt to the new way. No one will think to use something like this, so it will wither and die.

I am getting the platform thanks to this article! I was looking for a slack alternate :) All of our clients use Google :) So yeay! WIN!

If you are looking for a slack alternative you can also test out Boost. https://boosthq.io/boost/

I haven't looked at Spaces yet, but from your description it sounds like their version of Slack.

Should I remember you that Google is an american compay, and therefore you should endorse it?

Is this some European sour grapes?