What you need to know
- Google Chat now lets you add up to 8,000 members to a space.
- The change marks a significant increase from the previous limit of 400 members.
- It is now available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business users.
Google Chat spaces are now a lot bigger and noisier. Google has announced that up to 8,000 members can now be added to a space within the chat service.
The search giant has announced that it is allowing more participants to join a Chat space in order to "increase connectivity and create broader communities for your organizations."
Prior to this change, each space could only hold up to 400 people. With the latest update, Chat spaces are about to get more crowded. It is part of Google's efforts to boost "communication and collaboration for teams of all sizes in Google Workspace."
It's now rolling out to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business users. However, users with personal Google accounts won't have access to the new feature.
It doesn't require any admin control to enable the increased space limit. That said, the new limit is available only when creating new spaces for Chat-preferred domains. This service status is being used by domains that upgrade existing classic Hangouts users to Chat.
Meanwhile, the new space limit is applicable to all new and existing spaces in Chat-only domains where the classic Hangouts service is turned off. This means you can't create a space and add up to 8,000 members to it in Hangouts.
In late June, Google started notifying existing Hangout users to make the switch to Chat as the transition from the legacy service nears completion.
Google Chat began allowing users to create spaces earlier this year. Spaces can also be shared with others in an organization via a link.
On the other hand, some of the best messaging apps have a more modest limit on how many people can join a group. Slack, for example, allows up to 1,000 people to be added to a channel at once. WhatsApp groups can only accommodate up to 512 people.
The increased limit on how many people can join a space may make it easier to spread important messages, but it's likely to result in an avalanche of chat notifications.
