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

Posted by BeauHD on from the enterprise-focused dept.

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.

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Not Questionable At All by WankerWeasel · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. This is crazy. by imidan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.