Another Look at Google Rooms
Google has made Rooms available to everybody. But it's a mess.
Now that Google has made Chat and Rooms available for all Gmail accounts, they are planning a new (more intuitive and flexible) UI for release this summer, and a repositioning as 'Spaces' in place of 'Rooms'. Right now Rooms are very very limited.
Above see the creation of a 'Room task'. Note these tasks can't have subtasks, and there's no way to comment on them, even in the chat part of the room. However, they can be assigned to people.
Google Tasks in the Gmail sidebar (above) shows the Room tasks, but there is no way to add a Google Task to a Room. Google Tasks are organized by lists, a different organization scheme. But these tasks do have subtasks as an option.
So two slightly overlapping and incompatible task schemes. Google Rooms remains a confusing snarl of ideas.
And, relative to the content-centric goals I have for workings tools, there is no native note capability, just the ability to create or link to Google Docs in the Files tab. I don’t think this is a solid approach for workings.
Google should support a lightweight note capability, basically a subset of Google Docs that drops paper orientation (pages, footers, page numbers, and so on), as well as dropping a great deal of the complexity of Docs. Something with a handful of themes that define fonts, and colors. Retain a simple version of sharing, for co-editing and comments. Offer a means to embed tasks in this hypothetical Google Notes app, and of course, the ability to change Notes to Docs and vice versa.
There is a new user experience supposedly coming this summer. We’ll see what Spaces will offer.
