One of the new VIP audio chat platforms won’t be invite-only for long.
Twitter is planning to roll out its Twitter Spaces feature to every user in April. The company has been testing out Spaces, its live audio Clubhouse competitor, since late last year.
Clubhouse has taken the social media space by storm over the past year. Names like Elon Musk have joined the platform to take part in live audio chats with its users. Clubhouse, however, is currently invite-only. If one doesn’t know someone already on the app with an extra invite code, they cannot yet join the platform.
While anyone can join an existing Spaces room right now on Twitter, only a small group of users have been able to host one. So, if you don’t know or follow anyone who has access to Spaces, you might be completely missing out on the feature for now.
Twitter plans to change that soon. The company said it wants to make Spaces available for all users from April in a Spaces room it hosted on Wednesday. The Verge first noticed the time frame. However, it should be noted that it’s Twitter’s goal to release Spaces for all its users in April. The company has left itself some wiggle room if it decides to push the rollout back.
Interestingly, an update for the Twitter iOS app released on the same day promoted Twitter Spaces as a new feature in the App Store description. Some users might have expected to have access to the new audio chat feature with the update, but that’s not the case.
Twitter also appears to have big plans to encourage users to create content in Spaces.
Jane Manchun Wong, a developer known for discovering upcoming features on apps, uncovered a “Tip Jar” option connected to Twitter Spaces. The screenshots of the feature posted to her Twitter account show the ability for a user to attach their PayPal, Cash App, Patreon, Venmo, or Bandcamp username. A Twitter user’s followers could then send a payment to a Spaces host or speaker via the feature.
Earlier this week, Mashable reported how Twitter seeks to differentiate its offering from Clubhouse. While the latter service is all about temporary, ephemeral audio that deletes when the chat ends, Twitter is planning to make audio and transcripts from Spaces downloadable. For content creators, this means being able to repurpose Spaces audio for other social media platforms. It also provides replays for users who missed out on the live audio chat.