5 ms·

Facebook Is Said to Be Building a Product to Compete with Clubhouse

14 points by coloneltcb 6y ago

cblconfederate 6y ago
The telephone? the conference call? Isn't Clubhouse the new Quora? Fun while they have access to SV VIPs, but doesn't scale?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jimmy2020 6y ago
  or discord?
  - tracyhenry 6y ago
    or meetup? or podcast? or snapchat?
echan00 6y ago
I mean this shouldn't be news. Facebook is a social media company. Given their size they should be developing a competitor regardless of success or failure to hedge their business.
afinlayson 6y ago
Clubhouse's tech is so simple it could be built in a few days, the thing they figured out is how to get a clubhouse feel by having a bunch tech celebrities on their platform. It's like a secret society of people who get together in their "clubhouse" and talk about #TOPIC. Facebook will fail, because it'll be open to all, and no one wants that.
- jimmy2020 6y ago
  no product succeeds because it depends on elites as an audience.
  - apsec112 6y ago
    Facebook itself got started among Harvard students, who are certainly a kind of elite.
    - jimmy2020 6y ago
      exactly, just imagine the Fb business model is still at the campus level.
      - afinlayson 6y ago
        Imagine building a platform like facebook today without finding your audience first ... it'd fail cough Google Plus cough You must remember there was 100s of other social media companies trying to make it that didn't succeed. Just because FB did, doesn't mean it will again.
jimmy2020 6y ago
Considering where Clubhouse is right now, FB product will be much better & more sophisticated.
carlosdp 6y ago
If I were Paul & Rohan, I wouldn't be concerned about this, or Twitter Spaces, or any of that. Scale is an advantage, but also a massive disadvantage when trying to launch a product like this. Clubhouse has gotten to work out the kinks and scale things like trust & safety and room moderation little by little, and flesh out the exact things necessary to achieve product-market fit. Facebook and Twitter are going to have to figure out how the hell to handle all the trust and safety issues for audio at billion user scale, before they can even launch the product (IF they ever actually do). They also have to figure out how to jam it in to their product line, another non-trivial problem (how many people even visit the Reels tab on instagram, or know it exists?). Case in point, remember Facebook Dating? I don't.
throwawaysea 6y ago
It's really disappointing that big tech companies can get away with stealing others' ideas. It's a gap in our governance system, whereby patents don't protect this type of intellectual innovation. Even if it did, the smaller companies have no practical way to go after big companies. They can't afford prolonged legal battles, and the "defensive" patent portfolios these big companies amass really allow them to bully small companies into submission, often using frivolous patents. The intellectual property system has been flipped upside-down with the opposite of the incentives we wanted out of it, and it more closely just resembles regulatory capture. Mind you, I'm not saying Clubhouse has invented some new core technology. It's more like the value they have identified, via a smart product or business, is now something someone with greater capital and resources can simply exploit. The rewards aren't going to the innovator who identified that value.

14 points by coloneltcb 6y ago

The telephone? the conference call? Isn't Clubhouse the new Quora? Fun while they have access to SV VIPs, but doesn't scale?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jimmy2020 6y ago
or discord?
- tracyhenry 6y ago
  or meetup? or podcast? or snapchat?

echan00 6y ago

I mean this shouldn't be news. Facebook is a social media company. Given their size they should be developing a competitor regardless of success or failure to hedge their business.

afinlayson 6y ago

Clubhouse's tech is so simple it could be built in a few days, the thing they figured out is how to get a clubhouse feel by having a bunch tech celebrities on their platform. It's like a secret society of people who get together in their "clubhouse" and talk about #TOPIC. Facebook will fail, because it'll be open to all, and no one wants that.

jimmy2020 6y ago
no product succeeds because it depends on elites as an audience.
- apsec112 6y ago
  Facebook itself got started among Harvard students, who are certainly a kind of elite.
  - jimmy2020 6y ago
    exactly, just imagine the Fb business model is still at the campus level.
    - afinlayson 6y ago
      Imagine building a platform like facebook today without finding your audience first ... it'd fail cough Google Plus cough You must remember there was 100s of other social media companies trying to make it that didn't succeed. Just because FB did, doesn't mean it will again.

jimmy2020 6y ago

Considering where Clubhouse is right now, FB product will be much better & more sophisticated.

carlosdp 6y ago

If I were Paul & Rohan, I wouldn't be concerned about this, or Twitter Spaces, or any of that. Scale is an advantage, but also a massive disadvantage when trying to launch a product like this. Clubhouse has gotten to work out the kinks and scale things like trust & safety and room moderation little by little, and flesh out the exact things necessary to achieve product-market fit. Facebook and Twitter are going to have to figure out how the hell to handle all the trust and safety issues for audio at billion user scale, before they can even launch the product (IF they ever actually do). They also have to figure out how to jam it in to their product line, another non-trivial problem (how many people even visit the Reels tab on instagram, or know it exists?). Case in point, remember Facebook Dating? I don't.

throwawaysea 6y ago

It's really disappointing that big tech companies can get away with stealing others' ideas. It's a gap in our governance system, whereby patents don't protect this type of intellectual innovation. Even if it did, the smaller companies have no practical way to go after big companies. They can't afford prolonged legal battles, and the "defensive" patent portfolios these big companies amass really allow them to bully small companies into submission, often using frivolous patents. The intellectual property system has been flipped upside-down with the opposite of the incentives we wanted out of it, and it more closely just resembles regulatory capture. Mind you, I'm not saying Clubhouse has invented some new core technology. It's more like the value they have identified, via a smart product or business, is now something someone with greater capital and resources can simply exploit. The rewards aren't going to the innovator who identified that value.