I feel like I’m back in high school. On the outside looking in while all the cool kids congregate at a house party that I wasn’t invited to. Except this time it’s an invite only virtual party inside Clubhouse, a new voice based chat app that’s still in beta.
As Wired puts it:
“Fads come and go. Exclusive apps for everything from email (Superhuman) to dating (Raya) get christened by investors, and then are mostly forgotten. Clubhouse—a sort of voice-based chat room—is the furor du jour. In a matter of weeks, it has become the talk of Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey and Hannibal Buress have been said to hang out there. The other day, E-40 hopped on Clubhouse to share thoughts about the future of rap, and MC Hammer joined a conversation about how the new coronavirus has affected prison populations. Marc Andreessen, who spends a great deal of time on the app, is known to talk shop with anyone in the room. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, won a bidding war this week to invest $10 million in the app, plus $2 million in secondary shares. That’s a big bet that Clubhouse’s formula can last longer than the boredom of the pandemic, and its current buzz.
For the few thousand who have scored early invites, spending hours on Clubhouse has become a source of bragging rights—due to the app’s appeal, surely, but maybe also because everyone has been home-bound in a months long pandemic. Some have attributed their time spent in the app to being lonely, isolated, or simply ‘single.’ Entering one of Clubhouse’s ‘rooms’ feels like dropping into a house party, if you close your eyes. Or at least, Clubhouse fans say, it’s a much closer approximation to real-world socializing than Twitter or TikTok.”
Man, what I wouldn’t give to be able to sit in on a conversation with Marc Andreessen or be in an entire room filled with top level venture capitalists. Or imagine a room filled with baseball executives and general managers?!?! That would be insane! Forget about being a fly on the wall, now you can actually be IN the room! That’s assuming, of course, that the app will be open to everyone and regular folk like me will be allowed to mix equally with celebrities. The fact that is invitation only right now might be the only reason why it works. Perhaps the idea just won’t scale.
TechCrunch adds more color:
“Clubhouse was built by Paul Davison, who previously founded serendipitous offline people-meeting location app Highlight and reveal-your-whole-camera-roll app Shorts before his team was acquired by Pinterest in 2016. This year he debuted his Alpha Exploration Co startup studio and launched Talkshow for instantly broadcasting radio-style call-in shows. Spontaneity is the thread that ties Davison’s work together, whether its for making new friends, sharing your life, transmitting your thoughts, or having a discussion.
It’s very early days for Clubhouse. It doesn’t even have a website. Don’t confuse it with the similarly named Clubhouse.io. There’s no telling exactly what it will be like if or when it officially launches, and Davison and his co-founder Rohan Seth declined to comment. But the positive reception shows a desire for a more immediate, multi-media approach to discussion that updates what Twitter did with text.”
All in all, the early buzz surrounding Clubhouse points to a larger trend involving voice based apps and there’s a real chance that we really are looking at the Next Big Thing in the form of these AOL chat rooms come to life. Aside from filling boredom during a pandemic, voice based apps could become prevalent in everything from business dealings to online dating; these chat rooms becoming our go to destinations for project management, networking, spreading news, and getting to know potential love interests.
Twitter’s new voice tweet feature is further proof that we’re heading in this direction and there’s really no end in sight. The trend first dates back to when Siri and Alexa initially came onto the scene and we started using our voices to interact with our phones and devices. After all, why fuddle around with remote controls, mouses, and tiny keypads on mobile devices when we can just communicate in the most natural way possible: with our voices.
As that became second nature it was only a matter of time before we started applying our voices elsewhere. And now there’s really no telling what will come next. Clubhouse is just the beginning. Hopefully though, we’ll actually get invited to whatever comes next.
Is Clubhouse the Greatest Idea Ever?
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