Facebook is supposedly developing its own Clubhouse competitor, following the success of the social audio app.
According to sources familiar with the matter, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken quite a liking to the rather new and booming Clubhouse app. As reported by The New York Times, Facebook executives have given the order to its employees to develop a product that is similar to Clubhouse. Sources have said that the product is still “in its earliest stages of development”, so there is no telling when it may be available to the public.
It was only five days ago since Zuckerberg was spotted on the app, and joined a room to discuss AR and VR technology. Facebook is no stranger to adopting features from competitors and creating clones based on other successful apps. More recently, Instagram’s Reels were introduced following the success of TikTok. Instagram Stories were another feature that Facebook cloned from Snapchat.
Clubhouse, which is currently an invite-only iPhone app has been steadily gaining more and more buzz recently. It allows users to gather in an audio-only chat room to discuss various topics. Throughout the pandemic, Clubhouse has built a bit of mystic around it due to it not being widely available to the public. Celebrities, influencers, and members of the media have all taken part in Clubhouse chats and the app has risen to the number one spot on the App Store in various countries such as Japan, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. In Canada, it’s listed in the 11th spot of Top Free Apps.
In December of last year, Twitter began testing its own Clubhouse feature called Spaces.
aye we’re live! what up y’all, we’re the team behind Spaces––a small experiment focused on the intimacy of the human voice🧵
— Spaces (@TwitterSpaces) December 17, 2020
Currently, Spaces is being tested in a beta format with a small group of users able to test the feature before Twitter begins a wider rollout.
