Google Chat now lets you build much larger communities in each space

Until now, Google Chat spaces have been limited to 400 members, which is plenty for close-quarters collaboration. However, for larger organizations that hope to include more people and teams into one space, this number is extremely low. With Workspace becoming more popular among larger companies and even in schools, Google is now appealing to this notion of broader communities for all.

As spaces become a replacement for Google Currents (Google+ for Enterprise), it continues to gain social media-like features. In its latest update, Google is adding the ability to include up to 8,000 members per space! That’s a large jump up from the aforementioned 400, and I personally wonder how many organizations will make use of this increase and how much.

As you can see in this image provided on the company’s Workspace Updates blog, the example space has nearly capped out at the new 8k members limit, which is available across the board already, with no rollout waiting period! I think the next thing to do is to take spaces and make them more like forums or Google+ where there’s a more permanent feed.

Chat rooms like Google Chat and Discord have recently implemented threading to make topics stick around longer as opposed to immediately being buried under thousands of people’s messages, but I think this will come full circle and look more like a social network in due time again.

Spaces with up to 8,000 members cannot be created on Google hangouts, but other than this the only other restriction is that Chat-preferred domains can only apply this new limit to newly created spaces. Sorry, no existing spaces can utilize it unless they are Chat-only domains!

Oh, and this also does not apply or become available to personal Google accounts, but I don’t imagine anyone outside of an organization, company, or school could possibly make use of so many members lots. If you have that many friends and just so happen to be obsessed with Google Chat (and can sway 8k people to join and be active) then maybe Google should have hired you to manage Google+ instead of killing it off. You’d have to be a special breed of social individual to pull that off! Let me know down below if you and your team are currently utilizing spaces for collaboration and more importantly, how.