Twitter has had a stroke of genius when it comes to Spaces, its social-audio platform à la Clubhouse. Its newest idea to grow the platform’s audience: let anyone use it. Including those who don’t have or want an account.
From today, Spaces hosts can send anybody a link to a particular audio stream, allowing them to listen in via their web browsers. By extension, we imagine listeners who have received links directly can spread them around too, which could widen the feature’s reach pretty substantially.
There’s Space for everyone
Twitter made a tongue-in-cheek announcement, saying, “have friends not on Twitter? that’s weird but now you can share direct links to your Spaces and they can listen in via web without being logged in.”
There’s a weird problem here, though. See, normally a blocked user wouldn’t be able to join a Space should you start it. Makes sense. But should that user get a hold of the all-access link to your stream, they would simply have to log out and dive in, circumventing the block. Perhaps in future, Twitter will find a way to address this, though we’re not sure how.
While social-audio platforms are still popular, they aren’t quite as novel as they were a few months ago, where every new Clubhouse and Clubhouse lookalike update would temporarily light up the internet.
Twitter seems serious about the endeavour though and has been working to make Spaces more appealing in order to reach more people fairly consistently. Back in May, it gave anyone with 600 or more followers the ability to host, before dropping the follower count entirely and letting anyone host towards the end of October.
The platform took it one step further a few days ago, rolling out a new Spaces recording feature so that they could be played later, capitalising on potential audience members who simply can’t make streams while they’re live.