Facebook has announced live audio rooms, a home clone of its club

On Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a plan to enter the company’s social sound space. “We also believe that audio will be a first-rate medium,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Discord journalist Casey Newton. “Every now and then a new medium comes along that can get into different areas,” Zuckerberg said. “I think that’s going to be true with these live audio rooms.”

For the 600 people who were listening, it was a serious irony. Live audio is not exactly a “new medium”. The platform interviewed by Newton, CEO of Facebook, has been offering live audio for five years and is worth it $ 10 billion. The clubhouse, now a year old, was recently valued 4 billion dollars. The rapid rise of this startup was duly indicated by the more established platforms as they launched or announced it their live audio functions in recent months: Twitter Audio Spaces, Reddit Talk, even working on LinkedIn.

When Facebook takes the idea it’s hardly new, but the lack of originality does never he stopped company before. Soon, it will debut a competing Clubhouse, called Live Audio Rooms, where people can chat in real time. The company is initially testing the feature on Facebook Groups and public figures, but a blog post on Monday he hopes the room will be “available to everyone on the Facebook app for the summer.” It also plans to expand live audio rooms for the Messenger app this summer.

Facebook is also introducing other audio products. One is Soundbites, which Zuckerberg described as audio “content” – a place to make jokes, poems, gems, or anecdotes that fit into an algorithmic feed. (Twitter a similar feature in the first year; not surprisingly, “tweeting with your voice” hasn’t come out yet.) Another is Boombox, a music-sharing partnership with Spotify. Facebook will add space to play and discover podcasts live from its main app.

The social audio category is already very crowded, but Facebook’s competition comes with some advantages. The company already has more than 2 billion users, offering an integrated audience base. His successful advertising business means he has a lot of financial and human resources to embark on this latest initiative, if the directors choose to do so. Clubhouse, meanwhile, doesn’t have an Android app yet. However, the size of Facebook does not guarantee that the day will win. The conquest of copying has long been on Facebook’s playbook, and strategies can sometimes bear fruit. When Facebook stole the Stories format from Snapchat, users liked it a lot; Reels ’reception, his TikTok ripoff, has been more confusing.