
Clubhouse’s prime appeal has been its real-time nature. However, the audio-based social network is moving away from that ethos — at least slightly.
The firm is introducing new ways to share audio from rooms with new features called Clips and Replay. Clips, as the self-explanatory name suggests, will enable you to share 30-second snippets of ongoing rooms on social media.
Till now, if you wanted a friend to join in a room, you had to share a link and tell them what’s it about. But now, you’ll be able to share a small preview of the discussion that’s going on.
If you’re a room host or moderator, you’ll be able to disable this feature at any time. Clips will be on by default for public rooms. This feature is rolling out to a small set of people in beta starting today.
✨ lots of new news in this video ✨
✂ CLIPS is in beta
🔎 SEARCH rolling out now
▶️ REPLAYS coming soonand stay tuned for our entire eng & design team moving to LA to formally pursue voice acting pic.twitter.com/bUTabb9TDO
— Clubhouse (@Clubhouse) September 30, 2021
Folks using Clubhouse regularly have asked for a recording feature for ages, and the company is giving it to them, in a way. Soon, if you’re hosting a room, you’ll be able to use a new feature called Replays, which will record your session and make the room discoverable for as long as you want.
People will be also able to download a copy of the recording. Sounds just like, um, podcasts. These two features will make staunch live-audio fans frown a bit, but with competitors such as Facebook, Twitter, and Discord around, Clubhouse needed to provide some differentiating features for creators to make them stick around.
Clubhouse also announced a ton of new features, including universal search for rooms and people, and spatial audio for Android. You can read about all of them here.
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