The New York Times has reported that Facebook is building an audio-chat platform—similar to the popular Clubhouse app. Their new product is still in their “earliest stages of development”.
“We’ve been connecting people through audio and video technologies for many years and are always exploring new ways to improve that experience for people,” said Emilie Haskell, a Facebook spokeswoman.
Clubhouse is already valued at USD 1 billion (about RM4 billion) since its launch in 2020 despite it currently being an invite-only app. It is basically an audio chat-platform where users can make and join rooms to talk and listen in real-time. You can learn more about it here.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has even appeared in the Clubhouse app. He participated in “The Good Time Show”—a talk show on Clubhouse to talk about futuristic technology and how AR and VR can help people when they work remotely.
He has also reportedly been interested in audio communication forms like Clubhouse. Facebook executives have even stated privately that they have ordered employees to create a similar product.
Jumping on the bandwagon of popular social media trends isn’t something new to Facebook. We’ve seen them do this over and over again with services and apps like Snapchat (Facebook made Stories) as well as TikTok (Facebook made Reels).
And sometimes, Facebook’s version of whatever it is they’re trying to emulate ends up being even more popular than the original app. But, this isn’t surprising because Facebook has a vast network of social media platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) that has billions of active users for them to leverage. Compare that to the invite-only Clubhouse and you can kind of see where this could go for the social networking giant.
Twitter is also testing out a similar audio-chat platform called Spaces. According to Twitter, Spaces will be open to “a limited group of individuals” before it’s available for the public—just like Clubhouse.
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