By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 25th, 2024
Apart from the Live Audio Rooms, Zuckerberg also announced Facebook would be launching a new product called Soundbites.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of social networking service company Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB), has announced that the company is working on features similar to the app Clubhouse. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook is building audio features that will enable users to have real-time conversations with others.
Facebook Is Going to Build Feature Similar to Clubhouse
Audio-only app Clubhouse gained a lot of attention earlier this year as several new users joined the social network. Like Clubhouse, Facebook CEO said that the company is planning to fund the building of audio features and work on further development over the years.
Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s new move while speaking in an interview on the 19th of April. “We think that audio is of course also going to be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products to be built across the whole spectrum,” the CEO said during the interview on the Sidechannel Discord server.
Furthermore, Zuckerberg stated that there are communities interested in audio-features applications. Hence, giving them a platform to come together “and have rooms where they can talk” is a very “useful thing.”
The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and Facebook will begin its testing within groups on Facebook. Facebook said it expects the new feature to be available to the 1.8 billion monthly users of Facebook Groups. The company added Live Audio Rooms would also be available to the “tens of millions of active communities on Facebook.” In a blog post, Facebook said:
“As part of this initial rollout – and because we know communities aren’t built just in Groups – we’ll also bring Live Audio Rooms to public figures so they can host conversations with other public figures, experts and fans…In addition to bringing this to Facebook, we also plan to release Live Audio Rooms on Messenger this summer so you can easily hang out with your friends, too.”
In addition, Facebook has plans for creators to monetize the new feature. People who want to access live rooms of creators will only have access through a single purchase or a subscription.
Facebook Announces Soundbite
Apart from the Live Audio Rooms, Zuckerberg also announced Facebook would be launching a new product called Soundbites. According to the blog post, testing of Soundbites will be over the next few months. Initially, the company will conduct a trial with few creators before making the new feature available to all users.
In the pre-market trading of $302.35, Facebook stock is a 0.036% fall from its previous close of $302.24.
This is not the first time Facebook will be imitating its social media rivals. In 2019, Facebook announced the launch of Threads for Instagram users, similar to several elements from Snapchat. Snap Inc (NYSE: SNAP) plunged 7% in reaction to Facebook’s announcement.