Google Spaces

Google's small-group sharing app that lived for eleven months, which was short even for Google

Shut down
19902026

Google Spaces was a group sharing app launched on 16 May 2016. You made a space for a topic, invited a few people, and shared links, YouTube videos, photos and notes into it, with Google Search and Chrome built in so you never left the app. It never found an audience and Google shut it down on 17 April 2017.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2016
  2. 16 May 2016 Launch
    Spaces launches

    Small group sharing with Search, Chrome and YouTube built in.

  3. 2017
  4. 16 February 2017 Shutdown announced
    Two months of notice
  5. 3 March 2017 Decline
    Creating new spaces disabled
  6. 17 April 2017 Shutdown
    Spaces closes

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: google.com, 28 May 2016 →

Browse google.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2016 2017 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Google 2016–2017 Founded Announced by Luke Wroblewski

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google announced on 16 February 2017 that Spaces would close on 17 April 2017, eleven months after launch. From 3 March users could no longer create spaces, only read, print and delete what they had.

Our analysis: Spaces was built for a real behaviour, the small group of friends planning a trip in a chat thread full of links, but it shipped as yet another standalone Google communication app into a family that already contained Hangouts, Allo, Duo and Messenger, weeks before Allo itself launched. It had no notifications story, no reason to check it, and none of your friends were on it. Google measured, saw nothing, and closed it before its first birthday. The name was later recycled for group rooms in Google Chat, which is roughly what Spaces should have been in the first place.

History [edit]

A room for every topic

Spaces was announced by product director Luke Wroblewski on 16 May 2016 as a tool for small group sharing, aimed at the trip-planning, house-hunting, book-club conversations that otherwise live in a group chat. A space was a topic room: you invited people with a link, and inside it you could search Google, browse in a built-in Chrome view and pull in YouTube videos without switching apps. Everything shared stayed findable, unlike a chat scrollback. It ran on Android, iOS and the web, and Google pitched it to conference audiences as a backchannel tool at Google I/O 2016.

Eleven months

The app arrived weeks before Allo and Duo, joining Hangouts and Messenger in the most crowded corner of Google. Reviewers asked the obvious question, which conversation app was for what, and users answered by not showing up. On 16 February 2017 Google announced the shutdown; on 3 March creating new spaces was disabled; on 17 April 2017 the app went off, with users able to save their content by printing or copying it out. In 2021 Google reused the name: the group rooms in Google Chat became Spaces.

The domain today

Spaces lived inside Google and left nothing behind but the recycled name.

Similar projects

ICQ The messenger that gave you a number 1996–2024 Skype The app that made calling the world free 2003–2025 HipChat The team chat that was there before Slack, bought by Atlassian, renamed Stride, and then sold to Slack to be switched off 2010–2019 Omegle Talk to strangers, for fourteen years, until it could not be made safe 2009–2023 Meebo Every messenger, in one browser tab 2005–2012 AIM Away messages and slammed doors 1997–2017

Sources [edit]

  1. Google Spaces Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  2. Google is shutting down Spaces Engadget 24 February 2017
  3. Google Spaces in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 June 2016

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).