Google Chat walks back its announcements posting exclusivity, now lets people reply

Earlier this year, Google added a new feature to Chat Spaces that let managers lock off replies, effectively turning a space into a bulletin board for announcements. I quite liked the feature and thought it was fine it its natural form, but it seems the company thought more about how restrictive this was and is walking back its exclusivity.

Now, on a new Workspace Updates blog post, it revealed users in a Space – organization members – will be able to reply to these “announcements”. This effectively seems to destroy the entire idea of such a space locked down at first glance, but there is a major separating factor that keeps announcement Spaces apart from regular ones.

Instead of being able to chat freely, create topic threads, and chat wherever and whenever you want, Announcement Spaces are still restricted to a simple reply system for chats that a manager posts – you can’t just go and start a different conversation or write anything in the main chat area.

If you’re starting a new Space and you set it to Announcements only, this feature will already be set up by default, but if you’ve already created one, you may need to go back and toggle this after the feature is fully rolled out.

Speaking of a roll out, Rapid Release domains are already starting to see it, and will continue to have it pop up and be available over the next week. Scheduled Release domain managers will need to wait until August 14, 2023 and the two weeks following to gain access.

Again, I’m happy to report that this is yet another Workspace feature coming to all licenses. Let me know in the comments if you have an Announcements-only Space, and how you use it for your team. I suppose it does keep things in check a bit and keeps conversation from getting too wild at work, but do you feel it’s too restrictive?