#559
TWITTER SPACES…AN EARLY BETA REVIEW
Twitter allowed me onto the beta for Spaces this week, and my early response it's a lot of fun, got me more hooked on Twitter again, has a lot of potential and will undoubtedly create some issues for the birded folk.
A quick review: Twitter Spaces are audio rooms. Hosts control who speaks or can let the mic loose. While very early days and limited functionality, it's clear Twitter is putting a lot of thought into Spaces before anything is created. The passionate developers of Spaces are using early user feedback in interesting ways, and we might be seeing a new playbook for how products should be created by social platforms. Spaces - and audio rooms in general - offer a glimpse of how people will consume content over the next few years (post-pandemic behaviour changes have yet to be monitored). While really harking back to the power of radio and the spoken word (everything is cyclical), Twitter is in a unique position to do multiple things with spaces from enlivening the user base to creating a new bunch of formats thanks to utilising tweets and timelines.
The spaces I have hosted and been inside feel very different from the promotion/spammy ones that Clubhouse is suffering from. Perhaps this will come, but Twitter has many advantages over Clubhouse and while one of them, Twitter's size isn't the best one. The best one is that the spaces feel like a catch up with old friends who bring other friends because - for right now at least - there's a social-graph element that Clubhouse doesn't have. Your phone's address book isn't full of the numbers of experts you follow on Twitter, just the people you know, and they might not be expert in anything. Beyond this, people seem genuinely open to being helpful because they are included, and it's not a club mentality/ethos. Both have pros and cons (privacy issues, spam in the timeline, limited functionality right now), of course. Still, currently, spaces get my thumbs-up, and with more functionality. Thanks to other new monetisation and group products announced this week, and Twitter Spaces, a new economy is about to emerge on Twitter fast.
__ DO __ Let me know if you want a C_NCENTRATE Twitter Space. Could be fun! // __ DON’T __ Not read the article below about moderation and audio spaces.
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