According to reports, people familiar with the matter revealed that Facebook plans to release a series of new “social audio” products , including a product similar to Clubhouse Voice Social Platform, and a product developed in cooperation with Spotify. Podcast discovery and dissemination tools, but not all products will be available in the near future.
The social audio products that Facebook plans to release include:
- When the epidemic caught fire on the Zoom web conferencing service Zoom, Facebook also launched a video conferencing product called Rooms a year ago. The company plans to release a pure voice version of Rooms this time .
- Facebook is also preparing to launch a product similar to Clubhouse that allows people to join different groups and interact with speakers on the virtual stage.
- Facebook users can now post text, pictures, and video messages on Newsfeed , and the company is also preparing to launch a similar voice message feature.
- Spotify has been investing heavily in podcasting in the past few years, and Facebook will release a podcast discovery product that connects with the service this time . It is unclear whether Facebook has other plans besides tagging podcast content and providing users with access to Spotify. (It is worth noting that: Spotify and Facebook have been married as early as 10 years ago. At that time, Facebook had been vigorously promoting the “accessible sharing” function, hoping to let Facebook users know what their friends are reading, listening or watching. But this project Failed soon.)
Not only that, the specific release plan for these new products of Facebook is currently unknown . Industry insiders believe that the voice-only version of Rooms is most likely to be released immediately. People familiar with the matter said that other products may not be unveiled until the end of spring this year, and even the beta version will not be launched before then.
In any case, these new product release plans show that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) firmly believes that its users are ready to use video and voice as an important way to connect with each other. In fact, he is not the only tech giant executive who is optimistic about this concept recently: Twitter is ready to launch Spaces, a product similar to Clubhouse . Apple may also launch a new podcast subscription product at the new product launch event on Tuesday at the earliest.
Zuckerberg plans to be interviewed by technology reporter Kasey Newton (Kasey Newton) at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, and Newton wrote this week that he and Zuckerberg will discuss Crazy transition period”, noting that Facebook is “increasingly interested in newsletters, live audio and other technologies.”
Facebook declined to comment, but said: ” We have been connecting users through audio and video technology for many years, and we are always exploring new ways to improve the user experience.” An Apple spokesperson declined to comment .
Zuckerberg has clearly expressed his interest in Clubhouse. This voice social service was released at the beginning of the epidemic and experienced rapid growth last year. Zuckerberg used this service many times, and once appeared with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek (Daniel Ek). At the same time, Clubhouse’s valuation has also been growing rapidly recently-just a few months ago, after completing a financing of 1 billion US dollars, it recently announced a new round of financing with a valuation of 4 billion US dollars.
At the same time, observers also suspect that as more and more giants start to race in the voice social field, Clubhouse may not be able to continue its glory in 2020 and earlier this year. This service uses a live broadcast method of burning after reading to disseminate content, and each room can accommodate up to 5000 people. The download speed of the service seems to have slowed down because of the loss of freshness, and Clubhouse has not updated its user data again since it announced that it reached 10 million users in February this year.
In fact, technology investor Shaan Puri (Shaan Puri) once tweeted: “Everyone seems to think that Clubhouse will detonate the future, but I think it will fail.” He said that it is difficult for users to continuously create real-time Of pure voice content to maintain existing users and attract new users.
But on the other hand, Clubhouse is still limited to the iPhone, so when it opens to the Android platform, it will almost certainly usher in a second outbreak. It is still too early to evaluate whether the live podcast or virtual meeting model created by Clubhouse will continue to be popular.
As for whether Facebook’s aggressive offense can pose a threat to Clubhouse, it is difficult to conclude.
Zuckerberg has always liked to imitate the services and functions of competitors or potential competitors, but the results have been mixed: For example, it has successfully launched the “Stories” function pioneered by Snapchat, but the Rooms function as a Zoom competitor has never been Seeing improvement. Although Reels, a short video app that follows TikTok, is advancing, many of the videos actually come from TikTok. In addition, Facebook will follow the example of Substack and launch a self-media platform.
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