Facebook is building an audio chat product similar to Clubhouse, reports Mike Isaac of The New York Times. Clubhouse, an invite-only social audio platform, claims two million weekly users about 10 months after launch. As Isaac notes, “Facebook is [known] in Silicon Valley for being willing to clone its competitors.”
Consistent with Facebook’s typical timeline, the project is “earliest stages of development.” In 2016, Instagram copied ‘Stories’ from Snapchat. Last year was busy too: When the Zoom boom hit, “Facebook quickly created Rooms, a group video chat service.” Instagram ‘Reels’ came next, heavily inspired by the summer of TikTok.
Just last Friday, Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance on Clubhouse to discuss augmented and virtual reality. Ashley Carman of The Verge weighs in: “His presence on the app was shocking, given it’s a new social network, so the fact that Facebook might now be cloning Clubhouse is no surprise.”
Podz is the latest startup trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery, reports Anthony Ha of TechCrunch. Podz CEO Doug Imbruce thinks that audio isn’t yet a part of everyday lives “because the experience of discovering and consuming podcasts is ancient. It literally feels like browsing the web in 1997.”
On the app, users browse ‘the first audio newsfeed’ of 60-second podcast clips. Imbruce says that “the beating heart of the Podz platform” is a machine learning model that automatically highlights podcasts’ best moments. Each listener's personalized feed offers friction-free exposure to a wide range of shows.
Looking ahead, the CEO is confident in the app’s growth: “We are really hopeful that we can both increase [the] amount of audio being created by 10x and increase the monetization of audio by 100x.” He’s not the only one. Investors include Katie Couric and (newly minted podcast powerhouse) Paris Hilton.
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