For what it’s worth, I built what I call a “zero screen app” for an art installation a couple of years ago. “Zero screen” meaning “you’re supposed to be experiencing the space around you, so the app has almost nothing on-screen worth looking at and is basically just black.” Even though the idea was that the participants would be using the app to interact with the space.
It’s kind of liberating! Makes you consider the physicality of the device itself in entirely new ways. Recommended!
More on the main contender:
https://www.joinclubhouse.com/check-1-2-3
I note that while one of its main claimed aims is to encourage diversity, it is Apple only...
I'm pretty bullish on this trend.
Relevant project (mine): https://audiblogs.com (lets you listen to any blog posts in your podcast player. It's like Audible for blogs.)
I wonder how popular this trend is going to be? I don't like audio books/podcasts, etc. and prefer text-only content.
When I started on Clubhouse I was hooked the first night. I had never talked to so many black people in my entire life (I’m an Asian Indian American for context). I felt like I got exposed to more black American culture in 6 hours on Clubhouse than in my entire life. I also felt extremely drained. It was a lot of consumption.
I fell off for a little while as I realized my feed getting pretty echo chamber like. Then I started seeing extremely interesting conversations pop up such as the main PM on Google’s Alpha Fold answering questions live about the technology. Most recently the mayors of SF, Austin, Miami, and Seattle were on talking about the massive swell movement of tech between these ecosystems. They were taking questions from a live audience.
There is something magical going on here. My two cents.
Relevant project, voice only forum for sharing agricultural knowledge: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1753326.1753434
I never plug here, but I am building a live audio school for group studying. At me here if you guys want to try it out. The project started in April 2020 and a week after I started prototyping I find out about clubhouse. Face palm.
I don't have the app, but from what I've seen from some reviews of it, it seems that Clubhouse is only popular because there are interesting people interacting in it. That will be a problem to scale because, as we all know, the average human being is not that interesting. I can think of many apps that were like that in the beginning only to become something else afterwards (not necessarily being unsuccessful). The first that comes to my mind is Quora, that was a very interesting place in the beginning, but not so much today (but hey, still valuable!)
We never expected audio to be this popular either when we built Narration Box :)
Clubhouse looks cool! Has anyone gotten approved from the waitlist and know about how long it took? I just signed up
So party lines are back?
Video is draining. You have to always be “on”.
It’s worse than physical meetings as the camera is always on.
Audio on the other hand let’s you focus on just the speaker. And what they are saying. No fancy UI to distract. No looking at the bookshelf in the speakers background. Just audio.
I find Clubhouse interesting in that its the first social media app I've tried that I really could not understand the widespread appeal, even if it didn't appeal to me personally.
The rooms I did listen in on seemed to be full of people promoting themselves to each other. Most seemed like almost caricatures of Bay Area VC or entrepreneur types, or the most left-leaning Twitterati. I just kept asking myself, who would want to listen or engage with this?
Clearly I'm the minority as it seems to be blowing up.