Currents, the last remnant of Google+, is shutting down, users being moved over to Spaces

I get a lot of people tell me that I’m a fanboy for loving Google+, but it truly was a next-generation social network…erm, I mean “social spine”. It featured innovative ideas like Circles before Facebook ripped the idea off and buried it, and was much more thoughtful about how it implemented features in a more modern way.

The biggest reason I loved Google+ so much though was because of the people. While Facebook was full of your relatives complaining about their day and about how dull their lives were, Google+ was chock-full of creative entrepreneurs and passionate intellectuals who were genuinely excited about connecting with new people and experiencing life. I still have friends in my life that I made during the time that Google+ was up and running.

Sadly, it was shut down by Google in April of 2019 after a security breach, and any hope of Google creating and maintaining a way for individuals to connect in the traditional social sense had been “sunset” for good.

However, I would argue that the company has been secretly baking social features into all of its services since that devastating day, but the new “social network” is the connection you have between your most trusted and tight-knit circles. More on that another day.

Today, we found out that Google Currents, the very last remnant of the ill-fated Google+ will be shutting down next year. As sad as this is to hear, it’s not at all surprising. Currents was Google’s last-ditch effort to salvage the Google+ platform. It pivoted the technology toward enterprise users, but if I’m honest, I don’t know anyone who really used it. That’s not to say that it was underutilized, but I strongly believe that society – especially business – has largely moved on to different means of communicating and sharing with one another than a “social feed” or “wall”.

Think about it – social feeds encourage loads of un-asked for spam from people who you may have invited into your life, but who have different interests than you. Essentially, the old way encourages you to curate people instead of topics.

Now, people will rally around topics of interest, and all of their news, files, discussions, and so forth are highly tailored in the same way. This is why a social feed no longer makes sense, in my opinion.

With the announcement that will start the process of shuttering Currents next year, Google has stated that it will transition users to its Spaces feature which is baked into Google Chat. While that may sound odd, keep in mind everything that we’ve discussed so far. People want a personal connection with trusted individuals on curated topics that they’re interested in – no spam and no-nonsense.

Google Spaces is exactly that – you create a “Space” for a specific topic and invite only people you want to discuss or share with. While it’s not exactly a social “network”, it certainly has features that people have come to expect for collaboration, and since Workspace is all about collaboration, it truly does seem like a perfect fit.

Upgrading Google Currents to Spaces removes a separate, siloed destination for users, and provides organizations with a modern, enterprise-grade experience that reflects how the world is working today. Spaces provide a central place for teams to engage in topic-based discussions, share knowledge and ideas, move projects forward, and build communities and team culture. 

Google Workspace Updates

Remember, Google+ for consumers died years ago, so this solution wasn’t meant for the everyday, casual Google Account holder, but that’s not to say you can’t use Spaces as a sort of social sphere. I’ve personally crafted Spaces around my family as a means of helping us tackle different areas of life together and it works great. The fact that Google is transitioning enterprise users to Spaces from Google+ reinforces my personal use case, and that makes me pretty happy.

In preparation for the shut down of Currents, Google says that it will begin adding new features to Spaces to accommodate and encourage better collaboration and communication. For example, larger communities and leadership communication, advanced search, tools for content moderation, and more. In addition to these, it’s also going to be beefing up search and discoverability, platform capabilities for app development, and enterprise-grade security and compliance, including data protection, data loss prevention, and Vault support.

If you’re currently using Currents (hah, see what I did there?) Google will share a timeline for the transition over the next few months, as well as provide help along the way. Even though you can cling to Google+ – I mean Current’s dying breath, you should consider moving your organization over to Spaces ahead of time so you can get accustomed to it before the hammer drops.