3 ms·

Clubhouse is a case where I expect the Twitter clone (Spaces) to eat their lunch. Twitter gives a social graph, and an asynchronous way to get to know people (

Clubhouse is a case where I expect the Twitter clone (Spaces) to eat their lunch. Twitter gives a social graph, and an asynchronous way to get to know people (accounts, really, one of the signatures of Twitter is how normal pseudonymity is). Spaces then gives the ability to throw together a little Clubhouse (synchronous voice chat) on top of that. My bet is that this works better as a feature, not a platform, and that the rise of Clubhouse was in fact an artifact of the pandemic. We'll see what happens.

echelon 5y ago
Same with Snapchat versus Instagram Stories. Except Snapchat was able to use their position and funding to invest in AR. Now they've got an incredibly compelling lead in that space. It'll be interesting to see what VR/AR/XR/metaverse products that Apple and Facebook have in the pipeline will do to that lead.
- baby 5y ago
  What’s their lead in that space? I saw some quite impressive filters there, although it’s just filters, and there are the snapchat spectacles which are interesting and I’m happy they iterating on that. Am I missing something?
  - addicted 5y ago
    Aren’t the Instagram filters equally good anyways?
    - baby 5y ago
      I'm not a filter pro, but I feel like there's a real difference between the ones on snapchat and the ones on instagram. Actually, so much that people use the snapchat filters and post them on instagram and tiktok. I figured that out when I wanted to try these crazy disney princess filters after seeing them everywhere on these platforms. It looks like this if you want to see why I was impressed seeing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zts4s2IbANo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zts4s2IbANo
  - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    I wouldn't really say it's a substantial lead, but Snapchat acquired Bitmoji for online avatars, and another map based location company. From what I understand, they are moving into their AR glasses and have plans to partner with game devs to incorporate your bitmoji avatar into the experience (kinda like Mii's) I don't know whether this will ultimately amount to anything since I don't use it, but they do have some semblance of a direction they seem to be taking the company towards.
- vmception 5y ago
  Snapchat's is just advertising space. The pie is bigger and big enough to accommodate Snapchat's ability to sell shares at the $100bn valuation. Every fledgling idea and initiative everywhere uses borrowed or pooled money and tries to go viral by doing their ambiguous "marketing" on those platforms. If you don't, your stakeholders will blame you. Dabbling in VR is a tiny tiny tiny part of why the story works right now. Big maybe about the future. But its a rounding error right now.
paxys 5y ago
That's always the expectation when a startup blows up to fill a niche in a space dominated by giants. "Facebook/Google/Microsoft will release this any day now and all the users will move over." Historically speaking, the chances of that happening are very slim.
- samatman 5y ago
  That's not the argument I'm making. Where Clubhouse is concerned, it's just... not social enough. If you load it when you don't know something special is happening, and just wander into random rooms, the chance of disappointment is high. In that moment, it isn't competing with Twitter Spaces, it's competing with podcasts. I would bet most users of Clubhouse also listen to podcasts, and the chance that they can load up some audio that they know will be interesting is pretty high. So Clubhouse's social network is weak. You can't just flip through Clubhouse real quick when you're stuck in line, and even when you have some time to kill, it's a crap shoot whether you'll find something fun. Where it really shines is special events, but that's not much of a moat. Twitter and Spaces is synergetic, since Twitter is always there, ready to offer you an infinite scroll of witticism, cute cat pictures, and the Main Character of the Day. It's ok if Spaces is kind of useless unless there's a special event. There's also the serendipity effect where you can be scrolling the timeline and see someone say "hey we're hanging out on Spaces", and just pop over. Clubhouse has a head start, and some remaining halo effect, but no real moat, nothing to keep the conversation on Clubhouse. The big draws on Clubhouse all have Twitter accounts, they can try out Spaces any time they want. If it works for them, they switch, and if enough of them switch, it's over. It's not inevitable, but it is something I'm starting to see happen in the circles I frequent.
  - babesh 5y ago
    I think that the synergy between Twitter and Spaces is more based on real time events where a group of people you follow can talk about the event.
  - mostdataisnice 5y ago
    There's a really salient point about reliability of quality content here - I curate which podcasts I listen to, so in my downtime, I can quickly pull those up. Unless my downtime is after 6:30PM at night, all the Clubhouse convos going on are amongst completely random and irrelevant people

echelon 5y ago

Same with Snapchat versus Instagram Stories. Except Snapchat was able to use their position and funding to invest in AR. Now they've got an incredibly compelling lead in that space. It'll be interesting to see what VR/AR/XR/metaverse products that Apple and Facebook have in the pipeline will do to that lead.

baby 5y ago
What’s their lead in that space? I saw some quite impressive filters there, although it’s just filters, and there are the snapchat spectacles which are interesting and I’m happy they iterating on that. Am I missing something?
- addicted 5y ago
  Aren’t the Instagram filters equally good anyways?
  - baby 5y ago
    I'm not a filter pro, but I feel like there's a real difference between the ones on snapchat and the ones on instagram. Actually, so much that people use the snapchat filters and post them on instagram and tiktok. I figured that out when I wanted to try these crazy disney princess filters after seeing them everywhere on these platforms. It looks like this if you want to see why I was impressed seeing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zts4s2IbANo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zts4s2IbANo
- TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  I wouldn't really say it's a substantial lead, but Snapchat acquired Bitmoji for online avatars, and another map based location company. From what I understand, they are moving into their AR glasses and have plans to partner with game devs to incorporate your bitmoji avatar into the experience (kinda like Mii's) I don't know whether this will ultimately amount to anything since I don't use it, but they do have some semblance of a direction they seem to be taking the company towards.
vmception 5y ago
Snapchat's is just advertising space. The pie is bigger and big enough to accommodate Snapchat's ability to sell shares at the $100bn valuation. Every fledgling idea and initiative everywhere uses borrowed or pooled money and tries to go viral by doing their ambiguous "marketing" on those platforms. If you don't, your stakeholders will blame you. Dabbling in VR is a tiny tiny tiny part of why the story works right now. Big maybe about the future. But its a rounding error right now.

paxys 5y ago

That's always the expectation when a startup blows up to fill a niche in a space dominated by giants. "Facebook/Google/Microsoft will release this any day now and all the users will move over." Historically speaking, the chances of that happening are very slim.

samatman 5y ago
That's not the argument I'm making. Where Clubhouse is concerned, it's just... not social enough. If you load it when you don't know something special is happening, and just wander into random rooms, the chance of disappointment is high. In that moment, it isn't competing with Twitter Spaces, it's competing with podcasts. I would bet most users of Clubhouse also listen to podcasts, and the chance that they can load up some audio that they know will be interesting is pretty high. So Clubhouse's social network is weak. You can't just flip through Clubhouse real quick when you're stuck in line, and even when you have some time to kill, it's a crap shoot whether you'll find something fun. Where it really shines is special events, but that's not much of a moat. Twitter and Spaces is synergetic, since Twitter is always there, ready to offer you an infinite scroll of witticism, cute cat pictures, and the Main Character of the Day. It's ok if Spaces is kind of useless unless there's a special event. There's also the serendipity effect where you can be scrolling the timeline and see someone say "hey we're hanging out on Spaces", and just pop over. Clubhouse has a head start, and some remaining halo effect, but no real moat, nothing to keep the conversation on Clubhouse. The big draws on Clubhouse all have Twitter accounts, they can try out Spaces any time they want. If it works for them, they switch, and if enough of them switch, it's over. It's not inevitable, but it is something I'm starting to see happen in the circles I frequent.
- babesh 5y ago
  I think that the synergy between Twitter and Spaces is more based on real time events where a group of people you follow can talk about the event.
- mostdataisnice 5y ago
  There's a really salient point about reliability of quality content here - I curate which podcasts I listen to, so in my downtime, I can quickly pull those up. Unless my downtime is after 6:30PM at night, all the Clubhouse convos going on are amongst completely random and irrelevant people