I really want to reserve judgement here...I want to wait and see how it actually functions, etc. But reading the description, (and my immediate reflex is to state that) it really looks extraneous, and definitely overlap for what G+ should/could be (or maybe is?). Unless i'm mis-reading, it basically is the definition of a type of social network:
1. Have/find content.
2. Have a desire to share/discuss content with friends, acquaintances.
3. Trigger some function/feature to share on a time line of sorts, so friends, acquaintances can see/interact with said content.
Not to sound so dismissive, (I hate to be critical for someone's hard work) but is that all that this new product is? Basically another (centralized) social network?
I think Google should instead develop an open source, federated protocol for maybe standardizing sharing via decentralized social networks. This would open it up to myriad apps/clients. Oh sure, there are some out there...but having it (the protocol) associated to Google would give it some authority - and by extension attract more devs to its ecosystem; though still keep it open/free. Side benefit, if Google sponsored and supported this federated protocol, they can begin to dive into the decentralized (dare i call it) movement. They could then position themselves to provide search (their original strength) across decentralized nodes, etc. Owners of their own decentralized nodes could choose to "play with Google" or not.
Who knows, maybe Google developing a federated protocol may not be ideal...but anything seems better than what this new product appears to be. (Seriously trying not to judge too soon though. ;-)
G+ and Wave didn't stick. They're giving up on those already.
Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier. Moxie's latest blog on Open Whisper Systems goes just as much for Google and carries even more weight there.
So they just keep throwing darts at the (centralized) social network space and hope that something will stick eventually. It wasn't a website yesterday, it might be an app today, maybe it'll be a VR/AR environment tomorrow.
> Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier.
I see what you mean but having a decentralized network where google can get a decent market share is still better than what they have now compared to facebook which is close to 0% market share if you don't count youtube. Think of it like gmail, thanks to imap and smtp being open and decentralized, Google was able to grab a sizable part of the market with gmail (they have 100M users now I think). So a decentralized social network with a google hosted endpoint would definitely be much more interesting than whatever they have right now. However, problem is that Facebook already won and also Google already tried this decentralized strategy with open social and google buzz and they were huge failures.
Also google suck at social mostly because the ceo doesn't care about social and is admittedly bad at it. Also Spaces is probably the worse name possible as it is really asking for MySpace jokes.
I consider Federated and decentralized to be very different solutions.
pertaining to google wave specifically, by joining the federation there is still a heiarchy of how connections are made.
If you join a federation for google wave all of your messages still go through the top tier of that federation, to my knowledge this was by design (obviously this is all deprecated) if my statement is incorrect please let me know, but I see federated and decentralized as have some similarities but at the core are different solutions.
I am referring to this message [0] from Apache Wave mailing list in regards to how the Wave federation was designed, I took it as face value but do not know how to verify for accuracy.... above my head.
They make their money off of advertising. Facebook is competing with them in this regard and if they can't replace them, the next best thing would be to undercut the competition.
I think that's the scenario the parent was thinking of. But, as you said, Google is still going for replacing Facebook. We'll have to wait and see how this turns out...
Google gives up on messaging, realizing they will not beat Facebook, WhatsApp, etc? Then they should create an open protocol! "If I cannot have it, then nobody should."
I keep a close eye on Apache wave but the movement needs some new vitality, I see it hanging on a small handful of courageous and incredible volunteers albeit, needs more devs.
While I don't recall Wave being specifically designed for social network, I did used to think how innovative it was for its time as a platform for many types of communication and interaction paradigms. Further, there is even an open source social network platform based on it, namely Kune:
I'm more than slightly burnt on Google, but I see a few items of promise here.
G+'s original organising conceit was Circles. These have all but disappeared in latest iterations of G+, as the complaints of critics from the first days of G+ have pretty much born out: Circles organise people but not content, they're unidirectional, those you have circled don't know where they are put. A very frequent statement early in G+, from all sorts, was "you're using Circles wrong". Which, quite frankly, should have been a massive indication of a fundamental architectural error.
Google have insisted on maintaining the regardless.
Another early observation was that G+ lacked a construct of warrens vs. plazas. There were specific areas that small groups could discuss items, but far less so for large discussions. Most of which quickly became utterly untenable.
Instead, what emerged are what I've termed "salons" -- specific hosts (Google's on Yonatan Zunger is among the better) who would come up with and foster intelligent discussion. This does mean hauling out the trash and active moderation, but when it works, it works well.
"Spaces" suggests that the new model has an intrinsic concept of, well, social space, an understanding Google have proven highly resistant to understanding. In particular, a social space is define by what it includes and excludes.
Among the spectacular failures of G+ were its immensely misguided and ill-fated mergers with Gmail (no, random asshats from public fora shouldn't populate my email autocomplete entries), and YouTube (no, my work and family contacts shouldn't know what my video watching habits are, nor do my G+ comments belong in YouTube space nor vice versa).
Google took loads of criticism for this, much from me. I have little hope of the lessons actually sticking, but I'm open to the possibility.
My concern with Spaces is that it will prove too structured, rigid, and fragmented. If it's aping another service, that would be Reddit, and it's helpful to remember that Reddit emerged as a single forum, splitting off into multiples only with time. Today, the challenge on Reddit is finding the appropriate middle ground -- a warren large enough that there's an actual conversation, but not a plaza so large that it precludes any structure from emerging.
I'd also very much like to see an open source, federated protocol, and have suggested as much myself. https://redd.it/1t21cj
Some interesting parallels with your excellent comments on circles: The old Windows NT domain structure was based on one-way trust: Domain A could choose to trust domain B, while B might not trust A (along with a set of include/exclude rules which allowed for even more complexity). This is the kind of idea that might look like a great way to implement principle of least privilege. But it turns out, that it's just too hard to maintain - and even if you have an organization with such high demand for compartmentalization, you rarely need one-way trust; you can get most of the same/better result with isolated systems on one hand, and federated systems on the other (eg: you have a "red room" that isn't networked, with strict protocols of what goes in/out for sensitive stuff). Couple that with the fact that "one way trust" doesn't really work - if you can pull in something dangerous like a spreadsheet, you've open yourself up to dangers from the "untrusted" subsystem.
I think it is similar with circles: It doesn't make all that much sense for me to list someone as a "close friend" and they to have me in their "random co-worker" group. With network effects (people who are actual friends, talk together and show people stuff in the real world) - there's no way to really keep stuff that's shared with group A secret from group B - it might not give a false sense of security (hopefully most people by now realize that if something is shared, it's no longer secret), but I think it does give a false sense of control.
As to your point about salons - this is my experience with Facebook groups as well. FB is a terrible medium for discussion, but apart from the UI/UX - it's where people can be found, and moderated groups can and do work rather well. And they basically work like you describe salons.
My argument to Google has been that independent controls for tagging content topic and controlling distribution are what's needed.
In the real world our informational transactions are largely determined by place, and we assume different roles by those. Home, work, gym, mosque, store, school, concert (performer or audience?), beach, etc. And how and who you (or others) are known varies -- the idea of single unitary identity is often quite absent.
Size of groups also matters hugely, and I think often of how dynamics change with scale. See the old Budapest String Quartet joke. Expertise, qualifications, and intent of participants also matters.
Not to sound so dismissive, (I hate to be critical for someone's hard work) but is that all that this new product is? Basically another (centralized) social network?
I think Google should instead develop an open source, federated protocol for maybe standardizing sharing via decentralized social networks. This would open it up to myriad apps/clients. Oh sure, there are some out there...but having it (the protocol) associated to Google would give it some authority - and by extension attract more devs to its ecosystem; though still keep it open/free. Side benefit, if Google sponsored and supported this federated protocol, they can begin to dive into the decentralized (dare i call it) movement. They could then position themselves to provide search (their original strength) across decentralized nodes, etc. Owners of their own decentralized nodes could choose to "play with Google" or not.
Who knows, maybe Google developing a federated protocol may not be ideal...but anything seems better than what this new product appears to be. (Seriously trying not to judge too soon though. ;-)