Twitter has just announced that it will be dedicating a separate tab in their app for the feature of “Spaces”. Recently, in another article I said that the main problem with social media applications these days is that they are all trying to be everything. Twitter might just have read that article and decided to increase my pain. Clubhouse, an application that is very quickly gaining popularity worldwide, is quite literally an app whose sole purpose is the same as “Spaces”. Spaces is a single tab, a small part of a very diverse application with the name of Twitter. Clubhouse is an application itself. It has a single goal, a single purpose and the creators and developers can use that much more efficiently.
Twitter currently has around 500 people testing the new version of its application which has a
separate tab alongside “explore” for Spaces. These 500 people are the same that tested the beta version of Spaces.
It is obvious that this will most definitely increase the communication capabilities of twitter’s users and allow them to interact in a better way with a larger group of people. The surprise is that twitter is going to monetize this feature from the bottom to the top. Twitter recently said that it was planning on a feature which integrated a “tickets” type function to Spaces. You will have to pay for some of the major “Spaces” on Spaces. Now, if there was only some other application which allowed you to do the same thing for free, then wouldn’t that just be great. Well there is, Clubhouse.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out. In the attempt to incorporate everything in their application, Twitter is forgetting what it is best at; TWEETS. There is no other application out there which has a feature even remotely similar to the perfection of a Twitter tweet. Just like there is no other application out there which can match the “story” feature of Instagram or the instant photo-texting feature called “snap” of Snapchat.
All the big companies are morphing into one type of an application and that is why smaller, less popular and less economically lucrative companies are gaining so much traction. For example, last year and even now an application made solely for video-calling took the technology world by storm. “Houseparty” is an application whose main focus is video-calling and it knows how to sell that simple fact.
If Twitter could simply unlearn, learn and optimize a method to sell the fact that it has tweets? It is over for the rest of the market.