Just like Google Wave, Meebo and many others before it, Google has killed off another product before it reached full maturity. Google Spaces, the social sharing service for small groups is the next in line to be killed off as soon as next week.
Announced on Google+ by Product Manager John Kilcline, Spaces will begin shutting down as soon as March 3rd with the service going in to read-only mode, however on April 17th Spaces and their content will be deleted.
According to Kilcline, there’s been a number of things learned about sharing ideas and content learned from people using Spaces over the last 9 months since the service launched. Those lessons will be folded into existing products but Spaces is effectively dead.
The Google Support page for Spaces advises that you can still See, save, print, and delete your content on Spaces up until April 17th. You can also delete or leave any spaces you created or joined and moderate people in your spaces. You can still also report abuse in Spaces, and block other Spaces users.
Google certainly kills off products fairly quickly – we’re looking at you Google Reader – however with Spaces the service never seemed to find its place. As with all good things, they must come to an end eventually, so if you’re a happy Spaces user, perhaps we’ll see some of your favourite features in other apps soon.
