Spaces – Small Group Sharing For Personalized Messaging From Google
This Google app is designed for people who want to share media and posts within a group and which allows multiple users to comment and rate their interest. Ideal for a small community with a common interest, such as a book club or a group of friends, the app would equally suit a sales team, or perhaps even a board of directors, in a professional environment.
Interface and Usability
Spaces – Small Group Sharing is essentially a chat room which allows you to post anything that is appropriate to the the group, such as reference material, TV clips or even jokes. What makes it different from other software of this kind is that groups are closed and cannot be searched for. The creator of the group, or an assigned administrator, has to invite you. This means conversations within the app basically go on privately which is why it may suit commercial organizations just as much as looser groups of friends and family members.
Interface and Usability
Designed for mobile technology, the user interface of Spaces – Small group sharing is intuitive to operate. Creating a ‘space’, as Google refers to it, requires just a few clicks. All you have to do is name it. The look of the space is then customizable, so you can alter the background colour to something more suitable, for example. Multiple spaces, for different sorts of groups, are easy to create and if you don’t want to receive notifications from one of your spaces for a while, then you can simply turn these off temporarily.
Of course, creating a space for a group is one thing, but how do you invite people to join the conversation? In Spaces – Small group sharing, all you need to do is to tap the ‘invite via’ button and the app offers a variety of ways to get others to join in. Bluetooth invitations are possible, as are notifications via email, tweets, text messages or by Google Hangouts. In fact, just about any contact method you can think of is covered by the app, making it easy for everyone who wants to be included. To add things to the space you have created, or been invited to, there is navigation button. Simply tap on it and Google offers multiple options for ways of adding things, such as links, videos and pictures, or you can simply type in text to add a new post. Once posted, the information becomes available to everyone in the space and a handy activity icon can be also be used to keep up to date with recent posts.
Conclusion
On the surface, Spaces – Small group sharing offers a little more than a closed Facebook group, but it handles access to multiple groups in a very convenient way that means you just have to look in one place. The user interface is simplicity itself, but the success of any space that you might create will ultimately come down to whether the people you invite to join it take the offer up. A big plus point is that it is free to download, so why not try it out and see for yourself just what imaginative purpose you might put it to?
