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Playspace is an incredibly innovative digital whiteboarding web software that segments users out into ‘Rooms’ where they can collaborate with one another with advanced tools. It seamlessly integrates into Google Calendar and has worked well for Workspace in the past. Now, Playspace is being bought by Google, and the company has put out a statement on its acquisition.
You see, Google has been hell-bent on creating the world’s best set of collaborative tools for the hybrid workplace that’s been born – no, created – and has some to be the “new normal” since the global pandemic began. Last year, it acquired ThreadIt – a company doing something in a similar vein as Playspace.
ThreadIt provides ‘short video recordings to share work, connect your team, and get your day back.’ The concept is simple – take something akin to a Google Meet agenda and call, and break it into short clips that can be watched and replied to asynchronously in a room. Video email, anyone?
It sounded more than a little exciting: here was a widely adopted platform, built atop one of the world’s most advanced tech stacks, ready and eager to evolve to meet the needs of remote collaboration. Google Workspace aims to be a key platform for teamwork in our new hybrid world, and seeks to pave the way with collaborative tools that just work. Javier invited us to be part of their journey in building solutions for the hybrid future of work — and the opportunity has us positively giddy.
Playspace – New Path
With its acquisition, Google is most certainly going to be kicking things up a notch with Workspace. The Playspace team stated in a blog post that the current iteration of its software will be ‘paused’ on September 9, 2021, and all user data will be wiped with the opportunity to export the switch is flipped. Afterward, it will come to life as an experience within Google Workspace, though we’re not sure how long it will take for that to surface. My bet is on a year or less, but only time will tell.
With Playspace, users can whiteboard, collaborate with one another on scratch notes, and even music. Each call participant has his or her own cursor with their name attached that floats around the screen while they make modifications (see below) and there are a slew of tools present that Google Meet simply doesn’t have at this time.
The obvious play here is to integrate said tools into Google’s video chat platform, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t see them bleed into its other products too. For instance, there already exists some cross-pollination between Meet and Chat in the form of follow up chat suggestions, and so on, so perhaps something you create in Meet via the new Playspace update (one day) will be dropped into your Chat or even in Gmail for further collaboration after the fact.
