The Verge: “Clubhouse reinvents itself as an audio messaging app”

Clubhouse is back, kinda. The app that popularized social audio rooms is reinventing itself to be more like a messaging app with new voice-only group chats called “chats”, as detailed in a blog post from the company.

Think of a chat as something like a group Instagram story that you contribute to with your voice. You kick off a chat by recording a voice message, and then you can send that chat around to your friends. They can then hop in and add their own voice recordings to create a kind of voice collage / conversation.

Jay Peters

So much of the so-called innovation coming from tech companies these days is either reinventing the wheel (copying features back-and-forth between competitors and redesigning perfectly usable software for no clear benefit), or over-hyping solutions in search of a problem (Bitcoin, NFTs, web3, and to some extent generative AI). Clubhouse never was more than a passing fad, and pivoting to audio messaging makes zero sense when every other major messaging app already has voice messages built-in. Some companies may be able to build successful niches, especially if they have a first-mover advantage (see Dropbox, Evernote, and recently Zoom), but over the long run most customers will favor network effects and better integration with other tools, not single-use apps with little interoperability.

Image: Clubhouse