Google has announced that it’ll shut down Currents, which was launched in 2019 as a alternative for Google Plus for G Suite. In a weblog put up, the corporate says it’s “planning to wind down” Currents, and that it’ll push the individuals who had been utilizing it to Spaces, which is form of like Google Chat’s model of a Slack channel or Discord room.

Google says that it’s making the change so customers received’t should work in a “separate, siloed destination” — as an alternative, they’ll be utilizing Chat and Spaces, which is able to quickly be prominently built-in into Gmail. The firm guarantees it’s going to make Spaces a extra appropriate alternative over the subsequent yr, saying it’ll “deliver new capabilities” like “support for larger communities and leadership communication, investments in advanced search, tools for content moderation, and more.”

While Google says its plan is to start out winding down Currents in 2023, “rarely used” options will fade out beginning in Q1 2022 (which we’re presently in). It lists the options that might be eliminated or degraded in a support document, and guarantees to maintain Workspace directors up to date about future modifications and the migration timeline.

Currents hasn’t gotten lots of love from Google. I used to be solely capable of finding three weblog posts about it on Google’s Workspace Updates website — the one announcing it, one in 2020 announcing that it was widely available, and the one from Thursday asserting it was being shut down. It was included on Google’s main list of apps that come with Workspace at one level according to the WayBack Machine, however it looks like it was eliminated someday in November 2021.

There’s nonetheless a hyperlink to a Currents web page within the footer on the Google Workspace web page, however clicking on it takes you to the web page for Google Chat. That seems like an insult to damage, however as Ars Technica points out the final word insult is that that is mainly the second time Google has shut down Google Plus. As the KilledByGoogle Twitter account vividly explained in 2020, Currents was created when Google shut down its failed social community for public use (after a significant privateness flaw was found), however type of wanted to maintain it round for enterprise customers. Now Currents finds itself not lengthy for this world and is being changed by what looks like certainly one of Google’s new favourite initiatives, Chats.

It’s additionally, by the best way, the second time Google has shut down its product named Currents — earlier than the present (ha) iteration, it was {a magazine} app. It’s an actual double-whammy, even for an organization that has a fame for dumping initiatives.