Clubhouse news has been relatively quiet for the last few weeks. Comparatively, at least. The audio live-room platform was turning heads all over the news-sphere whenever it so much as blinked, and has spawned more than a handful of lookalikes from competitors like Facebook, Reddit, and even Telegram.
But there’s always been one seemingly mandatory feature missing from Clubhouse: direct messaging. Well, the platform just let slip that DMs may be coming after all.
Slide into Clubhouse’s DMs
A few users noticed a currently under-development chat feature called ‘Backchannel’ pop up in their UI. The leak vanished as suddenly as it arrived when users began pointing it out, so details on how it works are scarce.
One user managed to snap a video of what Backchannel looks like. From a stage they entered the ‘hallway’, and then hit an arrow which took them to the currently vacant back channel, which looks very much like your cut-and-dry DM page.
Wow looks like accidental update of @clubhouse enabled in app backchannel & switch of side bar & full experience.
Seems it’s rolled back now but from what I saw it was beautiful!!
On stage > move to hallway > hit arrow > back channel popped up! @jowyang @GaryLHenderson pic.twitter.com/5bJfVlg7t5
— Fanzo (@iSocialFanz) June 18, 2021
Presumably, you’d be able to chat in Backchannels with solo users one-on-one, but given Clubhouse’s communal nature (one of its selling points) we’d imagine that group chats would be on the menu too. That’s speculation, of course, but it seems believable. There’s no official word yet, but we’d imagine the feature isn’t far from release. With all of the clones cropping up, we’d imagine Clubhouse is looking to keep up with and distinguish itself from its competitors.
Source: The Next Web