Google's New Currents App Is Its Enterprise Replacement For Google+ (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Now that Google+ is history, today, Google unveiled what will be offered to G Suite users in its place: Currents. The new app "enables people to have meaningful discussions and interactions across your organization, helping keep everyone in the know and giving leaders the opportunity to connect with their employees." The company says Currents has a new look and feel compared to Google+ -- it seems somewhat similar to my eyes -- and it's been streamlined to make it faster to post content and tag it. Posts from a company's top executives can be given priority in the Currents stream to make sure employees see it. Currents is launching in beta, and Google says G Suite companies can request access to the program starting now. Google+ posts will automatically be transferred over to Currents. (I'm just talking about G Suite posts; personal Google+ posts are a goner at this point.) If the Currents name sounds familiar, it's because it "was previously a magazine app that was the precursor to Google Play Newsstand, which itself was later replaced by Google News," the report notes.

Comments

Poor summary

[Livius]

From the summary I can't tell if I'm supposed to mock Google for re-inventing message boards or mock Google for re-inventing e-mail.

Re:Poor summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I laugh at the vanishingly tiny number of users who actually thought Google+ was good.

Re:Poor summary

[Darinbob]

Laugh if you want, but it was better than Facebook.

Re:Poor summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice strawman.

Re:Poor summary

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a strawman. G+ and FB were direct competitors. It's a perfectly reasonable comparison. It's also true, in my opinion. Not that it matters. FB have had the network effect sewn up for a while. If Google had made G+ more open (no fucking atom or RSS feeds FFS!) they may have had more luck.

Re:Poor summary

[bill_mcgonigle]

From the summary I can't tell if I'm supposed to mock Google for re-inventing message boards or mock Google for re-inventing e-mail.

Don't waste the effort. Google products go away after 18 months anyway.

Re:Poor summary

[Anonymous Coward]

It's attacking a position that was never advanced. It's a strawman.

EARTH QUAKE

[Anonymous Coward]

I to say RUN FOR THE HILLS but that not going to save no one no more.

Not Questionable At All

[WankerWeasel]

"Hey, let us be privy to your internal conversations, since you use your own email servers to prevent us from reading all these."

Re:Not Questionable At All

[PCM2]

Last four companies I've worked for all used Gmail internally.

Re:Not Questionable At All

[WankerWeasel]

Smaller companies may. Don't think you're going to find a lot of large organizations doing so when they can run their own system.

Ignore

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like something to ignore.

Re:Ignore

[Anonymous Coward]

You can not ignore it, as the Currents app will be force pushed to every Android device ever built. Somehow Google is unable to provide security updates after first year of device life cycle, but all their malwares are feasible and possible to backport.

Soon also all Google services will start to require a Currents account and even paid services refuse to work if this new system is not used for login. And of course every user gets a profile page generated, as the made-up user statistics are important for bonuses inside Google.

Can we still call it G+,

[wolfheart111]

Or... Im confused.

Re: Can we still call it G+,

[nazsco]

no beacuse it is much more.

Its the power of google wave, which nobody knew what it could do. with the reach of G+ (heh). with the usability of the never-used by anybody google magazine reader app. with the privacy of, well, Google. Packaged as a Slack killer.

So an enterprisey Dumbed down IRC app.

This is crazy.

[imidan]

I know it's become a cliche to warn people against adopting Google products because Google will discontinue them after a few years. In this case, though, I'm not joking at all when I ask: why would anyone trust this service to Google? They seem to have recycled Google+ and Google Wave into a re-implementation of IRC, email, and message forums. Which... fine, I guess. Of course, know that Google is going to consume everything you input into this system and use it to, at a minimum, advertise at you. And when Google finally does retire the service, maybe you'll be able to get your data out in some format that is absolutely useless as input to any other competitor.

I don't know what the open-source alternatives are, but I'd feel a lot better about using OSS for this purpose.

Re:This is crazy.

[WankerWeasel]

This is basically their take on a Slack competitor.

Re:This is crazy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nextcloud is self-hosted, or offers commercial support, and has chat, messaging, mail, shared folders and Googlr Drive/dropbox style sync, android desktop and iOS apps, wiki etc. plugins. It's worth trying.

Re:This is crazy.

[imidan]

That looks great. I used to work at a place where we cobbled together a combination of Owncloud, Jira, and Slack, and it was all kind of a mess. I'd like to try Nextcloud out.

Re:This is crazy.

[nine-times]

Yeah, I feel like they're sort of trying to take of Slack in terms of being a professional collaboration hub, but it's yet another experiment with some overlap with Google's other products, without a clear sense of how real people are supposed to use all of these semi-overlapping tools.

I understand the value of experimenting, but at a certain point, especially when you're targeting businesses, you need to make a stable and robust product instead of starting from scratch every couple of years. And I also understand the idea of creating versatile tools and letting users find ways to use them, but to some extent you also have to come up with some suggested and likely use-cases that are actually going to be useful. Google seems to flounder at both of those things.

For example, can they just come up with a coherent strategy on messaging/chat apps?

Bets on when this will get shut down too

[Anonymous Coward]

Taking bets on when this will get shut down like all of their other failed projects.

I google

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I just have the stuff they killed to promote Google+ back..

Igoogle and google reader ...

Fuck you Google

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just going to close this one too, because you're all champions of throwing shit on the walls to see what sticks.

For real?

[null etc.]

Jesus Christ, Google, you can't even kill a product without offering a flimsy, half-baked alternative in its stead.

We get it, BETA stands for "Be Expecting Termination Anydaynow"

Re: Wow

[wolfheart111]

sounds awesome... i think :|

How many months will this last?

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before they pull the plug on this new-ish idea?

Google+

[ledow]

You say Google+ is history - it still keeps getting pushed down to my phone whenever I try to remove it (which you can't do completely without rooting the phone).

You'd think they'd have the brains to forcibly remove the app if it does nothing.

Yammer?

[haeger]

What's the use? I mean, really?
This looks like a limited social media app, much like yammer. I don't use yammer and I probably won't use this. An email seems easier to use, and it gets pushed directly to the recipients inbox.

I really hate the "Someone said something on some network that we'll have you visit just to find out that it didn't interest you anyway" emalis that I get. Which is probably why I stopped using social media.

Yeah. Good luck with G++ google. I think is has the life expectancy of an antivaxxers kid.

No thank you.. fool me once

[Anonymous Coward]

No thank you.. fool me once shame on you..
and leave Jesus Christ out of this :)

Fool me once..

[propheth]

No thank you.. fool me once.. twice.. ..and leave Jesus Christ out of this :)