Google Will Shut Down Currents, the Work-Focused Google Plus Replacement (theverge.com) 28
Google has announced that it'll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. From a report: In a blog post, the company says it's "planning to wind down" Currents, and that it'll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat's version of a Slack channel or Discord room. Google says that it's making the change so users won't have to work in a "separate, siloed destination" -- instead, they'll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. Google says it will begin winding down Currents on July 5th, with data available for export until August 8th, 2023, when it will no longer be available.
...and no one noticed (Score:1)
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Did anyone actually know about this before now?
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I didn't know it had been rebranded to "Currents".
I did know that Google+ stayed on as part of their work suite (whatever that's called today) - I didn't use it, but Google does keep adding things to my work Gmail that I have to keep turning off.
Sounds like Spaces will be the next thing to get turned off... seriously, Google, when are you going to figure out you don't have a knack for this social stuff?
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Sounds like Spaces will be the next thing to get turned off... seriously, Google, when are you going to figure out you don't have a knack for this social stuff?
Spaces aren't really "social stuff", unless you consider team chatrooms to be "social". I mean, I guess technically they are, but by that definition so is email.
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Spaces aren't really "social stuff", unless you consider team chatrooms to be "social".
Well, I figure any online space where people talk about non-work stuff and post dog / cat pictures qualifies as "soclal"... and I see a fair bit of that on Teams (first-hand) and Slack (second-hand).
FWIW I don't think Microsoft really groks "social" either; they've just been better at leveraging their connections to the management level of most places. Teams sucks rocks... but I'm forced to be on it.
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The only slashdot users who have this deep knowledge of the inner workings of Google are so limited that this must surely be you, Sergei.
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Even if they did, they had to expect this.
Google has a long history of not getting social networks, buying in stuff, and then shutting it down:
Google Talk (the original GChat)
Google Huddle
Google Hangouts
Google Voice
Google Allo
Google Chat
Google Orkut
Google Wave
and now Google Currents
Google Meet is still going, but for how long?
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Google Voice is very much still a thing and of all of their projects, that is one that has enough users that it isn't going to be shutdown on a whim
Don't be that company (Score:2)
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They're still acting like a startup. New an shiny is exciting, I guess, but there is little more valuable in tech than consistency and long-term support.
I mean real long-term support, not the 10 minutes or whatever passes for it these days.
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They create actual fear of depending on anything from them.
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Yep. I've worked at govt departments where we've evaluated service providers for big online things that where potentially worth tens of millions of dollars for the cloud provider, and every time Google gets excluded almost at the outset because nobody believes its safe to trust google wont just yank the rug out ffrom under us with yet another product closure.
AWS will keep barely known products open indefinately even if they have newer, better and mo
Stop tyring to be linkedin or facebook google (Score:2)
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They are not a search engine company. They are an ad company with a dysfunctional corporate incentives structure.
You get ahead in Google by launching new products. So what is going on is that their management is launching new products to advance their careers, not giving a fsck about the market need, viability or business case for it. Once a product has been milked of all available careers, it will have to be shut down because there is nobody to man the oars.
And as long as the ad money keeps rolling in, thi
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They're still a search/data company, they just get a lot of income from selling advertisements.
Like you wouldn't call a Movie Theater a "popcorn company" even if that's where they made their money
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Oh but I definitely would. There are multiple angles to everything, you know.
If you want to talk about why people go to the movies, then a movie theater is a movie theater. If you want to talk about where the movie theater makes money, then it starts to look like a popcorn company indeed.
The same with Google. If you want to talk about why people use Google, then it's a search company foremost. If you want to talk about how Google makes money, or the oh so many ways it is fscked up, then it's most definitely
at this point (Score:5, Funny)
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If you depend on *anything* Google (Score:2)
make sure you always keep one eye on the exits. I have a Google email account because that's how my employer manages email, but everything I get sent gets stored on a private server. I'm not going to trust that my Google email folders will be there tomorrow.
Of course it will (Score:2)
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I wonder when Google will shut down Angular....
Google Graveyard (oblig.) (Score:2)
I'm still mad about Hangouts. >:(