Icon: enlarge
Clubhouse app: imitators are already being developed
Photo: Mark Schiefelbein / AP
The up-and-coming audio app Clubhouse is facing competition: Twitter is expanding the test run of its offer called Spaces.
And founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg also commissioned Facebook to develop a competing clubhouse product, writes the New York Times, citing anonymous sources.
Facebook is known to mimic popular features of other social media services in its apps.
The project is still in the early stages, writes the newspaper.
Twitter is already on.
So far, Spaces have only tested a few thousand users, but the number is increasing now.
For the time being, the conversations are only available in the Twitter app on the iPhone, recognizable in the top menu bar, in which Twitter's so-called fleets - the self-deleting tweets - are also linked.
Product boss Kayvon Beykpour said on Thursday night in a conversation at Spaces that he sees opportunities in supplementing the exchange of information on Twitter with conversations between users.
At Clubhouse, numerous users can take part in panel discussions.
Only some of them can speak at the same time.
The app has quickly gained popularity in recent months after appearances by celebrities such as Elon Musk, among other things.
In China, Han Chinese, Uyghurs, Taiwanese and Hong Kongers met in the so-called clubhouse rooms to talk about the persecution of minorities, for example, and the app was quickly blocked.
Twitter is considering a recording function
While Clubhouse limits the number of listeners to a talk show to 5,000, Spaces does not have any restrictions.
Up to ten participants can speak at the same time, but there should be more over time.
Many aspects are still in work, said Beykpour.
So it has not yet been decided whether there should be a recording function for later listening.
Currently, the conversations are gone after the live stream ends.
On the one hand, this makes users more relaxed, and on the other hand, it is usually not worthwhile to listen to conversations in full afterwards.
But he could imagine that it could be a useful function to be able to record interesting fragments of the discussion rounds for later sharing.
Twitter wants to develop new functions for the control of the conversation - for example the possibility to downgrade speakers who misbehave.
Twitter has the advantage that there is already a network of tens of millions of users who follow each other on the platform.
Clubhouse was criticized for the fact that the app requires access to the users' contacts for the invitation function and then uploads them to its own server.
Icon: The mirror
pbe / dpa
