Google testing Spaces: a group conversation app

Google has been experimenting with a variety of services lately, and one of the most recent ones to crop up is a beta project called Spaces. The testing arena for the device isn’t public, so you’re not going to be able to give this app a spin to see how it ticks, but we have gotten the scoop on some early promo material that gives us a good idea of what Google is angling for here.

It looks like a pretty simple group conversation app. Spaces is part of an ongoing trend to make conversations online more naturally focused around events. This is analogous to real life: you find yourself in a room with a group of people, and you have a natural conversation that focuses around the present moment and the topics at hand. Current online modes of messaging are threads that exist in a kind of ethereal, spacelessness without focus or direction. They’re unending chains, rarely interconnecting and often having nothing to do with a core theme.

Spaces attempts to build group conversations around specific topics and events. These conversations can be built on the fly to create a kind of interlocking web of conversations. A chatty social network if you will, with users acting as interlocutors rather than performers on a stage (as services like Facebook tend to encourage).

Google isn’t the only one trying to make a kind of messaging web like this, but so far none of these attempts have gained traction. It might be the case that people aren’t very interested in having online dynamics mimic those of real life. Whether Spaces will succeed where others have failed will yet to be determined. Stay tuned for Android Authority for more news on this app, but in the meantime, let us know what you think about messaging social networks in the comments below!