Tech giant Google is planning to announce some changes to its workspace apps and services. Now people would be able to switch over to Google’s more modern system for Gmail, Docs, and Chat where all of these functions can be combined and operated in a single tab, more easily, for example with chats sliding over to the left to reveal a shared spreadsheet. The move is a part of the company’s new “smart canvas” push designed to interlink its various apps via “smart chips.”
A new setting within its Gmail will allow the users to turn on google chat and messaging with an option available for use to everyone. This would include direct messages and chat rooms. But another new terminology that Google is looking forward to is the “evolution of Rooms in Google Chat to Spaces”.
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By layering on new features like improved message threading, more emoji reactions, user roles, moderation tools the, search engine plans to separate a “Space” from a chat room out into their own top-level form of communication next to Gmail, Chat, and Meet. This in practice implies that Spaces would be serving both as a slack competitor and as a competitor for public Discord groups. It could also come forward as a potential replacement for email groups.
Senior director of the product Sanaz Ahari says that users can more easily switch between “modalities” of communication. The intent is to “keep the context,” Ahari says. “If you start something with an email and then you want to upgrade it into more real-time interaction between a group — or even for a project — you’re able to do that and you can keep the context. Then you can all seamlessly upgrade into a meeting at the same time.”
The concept as far as the company’s messaging strategy is concerned seems a little confusing, however, it has promised it will “launch a streamlined and flexible user interface” for Spaces this summer.