Facebook wants you to start talking and listening on Facebook.
Sources say that the social network intends to announce a series of products – some of which will not appear for some time – under the “social audio” umbrella on Monday. These include Clubhouse’s Facebook vision, the only social audio network that grew rapidly last year, and a push to discover and distribute podcasts, aided by Spotify.
Facebook audio plans include:
- An exclusively audio version of the Cameras, a video conferencing product launched a year ago, when the pandemic stimulated the massive adoption of Zoom.
- A Clubhouse product, which will allow groups of people to listen and interact with the speakers on a virtual “stage”.
- A product that will allow Facebook users to record short voice messages and post them in their news feeds, as they can currently do with text, images and videos.
- A podcast discovery product that will be connected to Spotify, which has invested heavily in podcasting over the past two years. It’s unclear if Facebook intends to do more than tagging podcasts for its users and sending them to Spotify. Noteworthy: Spotify and Facebook first connected 10 years ago, when Facebook pushed the idea of ”frictionless sharing,” which meant that your Facebook friends could see what you were reading, listening to, or watching. came out pretty quickly.)
It is also not clear to me what the schedule is for the products that Facebook will announce tomorrow. My point is that the Rooms product – which is again a video conferencing version without video – is the most likely candidate to go live right away. Sources said other products may not appear, even in beta, until later this spring.
That being said, the announcements are meant to signal CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that his users are ready to use voice and sound as a way to connect with each other. He’s not the only Big Tech executive recently interested in the idea: Twitter has already released Spaces, its own version for Clubhouse. And Apple is preparing a new subscription podcast service that it can announce on Tuesday, as part of the launch of its own product.
Zuckerberg is scheduled to speak with technology journalist (and Vox Media contributor) Casey Newton on Monday at 1 p.m. East; This weekend, Newton wrote that he and Zuckerberg will talk about “this wild moment of transition in technology and media,” noting that Facebook is “increasingly interested in newsletters, live audio and other technologies.”
Facebook offered this non-comment in response to a question from Recode: “We’ve been connecting people with audio and video technology for many years, and we’re always exploring new ways to improve that experience for people.” Representatives for Spotify and Apple declined to comment.
Zuckerberg made his interest in Clubhouse quite clear, which was launched at the beginning of the pandemic and enjoyed rapid growth throughout the past year. He has appeared for several chats on the service, including one with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Meanwhile, Clubhouse has just announced a new round of financing that values the company at $ 4 billion – just a few months after it announced a round of financing that valued it at $ 1 billion.
At the same time, observers have speculated that Clubhouse, which features ephemeral, real-time chats in front of audiences of up to 5,000 people, may have difficulty recapturing the buzz it had in 2020 and early year, when much of the world was stuck and looking for distractions. The download rate of the application seems to have slowed down with its novelty, and Clubhouse has not updated its total users since February, when it said it has 10 million users.
And if you want a careful critique of the challenges of Clubhouse products, I suggest you read this Twitter thread from technology investor Shaan Puri. Tl; dr: It’s hard to constantly create live, audio-only content that attracts current users and brings in new ones.
So … everyone seems to think the club is the “next big thing” – but I think it will fail.
Here’s how I think everything goes down.
– Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) March 16, 2021
On the other hand, Clubhouse is still limited to Apple iPhone users and, when it opens up to the world of Android users, its numbers will definitely increase again. It is certainly too early to assess whether the format initiated by Clubhouse – a mix of live podcasting and virtual conferencing – will continue to remain.
It’s also obviously too early to tell if the massive scale of Facebook will help it dethrone Clubhouse. But Zuckerberg was not shy about copying services or features built by competitors or potential competitors, with mixed results: he successfully succeeded in the “Stories” feature pioneered by Snapchat, for example, but Rooms, his future competitor Zoom, never caught. And Reels, his attempt to clone TikTok’s short video service, is an ongoing work, which is largely stored with … videos that first appeared on TikTok. Next up: a branded Facebook version of the successful Substack newsletter writing service.