At Google I/O last week, amongst a slew of other products Google announced Spaces which is a sort of lightweight social sharing tool which shares some synergy with tools like Slack by allowing sharing and interaction without being a full social network.
To understand it fully, you need to spend some time playing with it, but this article from Mike Elgin does a pretty good job of explaining what it is and how it works.
The problem is, the product is likely to be Dead on Arrival.
Why?
Not because the functionality is lacking, or the user-interface is poor, etc.
It's also not because people don't want to use it: most of the people I know who have heard of it want to try it out at least.
The problem is that Google are actually preventing a lot of their customers from using it.
Specifically, you need a gmail account to use it. If you are a Google for Work user, one of the original Google Apps for Domains users, or you simply have signed up for a Google account against your own email address (running on a non-Google email system) then you cannot access Spaces.
Now Google have a nasty habit of locking out non-gmail users from their new products, which is pretty insidious when you consider that many of these users are paying Google for their account. That is annoying enough when you find that a service like Inbox isn't available to you until several months after launch. But that only stops you, personally, from using the service.
But Spaces is a social product. It relies on network effect and the ability to be inclusive. The chances are that, even if you have a gmail account, one or more of your friends or family have a non-gmail Google account which means you can't include them in a space. Network effects mean that prohibiting some users from accessing it effectively stops most users from being able to use it.
As an example, I tried to create a family space. All of the family I wanted to invite had a Google account, but more than half had a non-gmail account.
This limits the scope of Spaces and, as soon as people realise they cannot use it themselves, or cannot invite the people they know, they will abandon it. As I have.
Now, I'm sure Google will, eventually, enable access to non-gmail users, but that is likely to be several months away. By which time, it will be too late.
People will have moved on and Spaces will be a distant memory of yet another Google product that failed due to lack of execution.
