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New Delhi: Social media giant, Facebook, is planning a “series of products” aimed at taking on breakaway audio-only platform Clubhouse in the next year, according to a new report by Recode. The company is reportedly planning a suite of products that will feature social audio and also a foray into the podcast space.
According to the report, the company is working on an audio-only version of Rooms, the video chat product Facebook introduced to its Messenger platform last year, following the massive adoption of video conferencing platforms. It’s also working on a “Clubhouse-like product” that allows people to interact on a “virtual stage”.
Further, Facebook is also taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook, allowing users to record short voice messages to be posted on their newsfeeds. The micro-blogging platform had introduced voice tweets and direct messages a few months ago. A podcast-discovery platform is also in the works that will connect to Spotify, presumably allowing users to listen to the music streaming platform’s burgeoning collection of podcasts from all over the world.
Recode said that the timeline for these products is “unclear” at the moment, but they are expected to be announced today. The company’s plans to adopt features from Clubhouse had also been reported by The New York Times in February.
The audio-chat startup had announced that it closed a new Series C funding round on April 18, led by Andrew Chen, partner at venture firm a16z. According to a Reuters report, the fund put Clubhouse’s valuation at $4 billion and included other big firms like DST Global and Tiger Global. “This will allow us to heavily scale our team to support international growth, invest in localization and accessibility features,” the company said in a blog post. It will also be pushing new features like the “Creator First” feature it had announced, that allow Clubhouse users to get paid for hosting rooms on the platform.
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