Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addresses students during a town hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, November 12, 2018.
Anushree Fadnavis | Reuters
Twitter on Monday launched Spaces, a feature that allows users to join virtual rooms where they can engage in real-time, audio conversations with others.
The company began testing Spaces in November 2020 with a limited number of users. But on Monday, it will begin rolling the feature out globally to iOS and Android Twitter users who have 600 or more followers.
Spaces is one of the early entrants in a fast-growing market for live, audio-only conversations. This technology gained attention last year by Clubhouse, a start-up that quickly gained popularity among venture capitalists. Facebook last month also announced its plans to create this type of feature for its own services, and Spotify recently bought Betty Labs, which makes a live-audio app focused on sports.
Spaces will play a key role in Twitter’s ambitious goal to grow its daily active user base to 315 million by the end of 2023.
Here’s how Spaces will work: Twitter users will see purple bubbles appear at the top of their timelines when live conversations are happening. Users will be able to tap on those purple bubbles to join a Space. Once inside, users can tweet or direct message the Space hosts or request to speak.
As a host of a Space, users will have the ability to moderate their rooms by inviting others, choosing who can speak and removing any troublemakers.
Twitter on Monday also announced that it is working on an upcoming feature called “Ticket Spaces.” This feature will allow users to create Spaces that require others to purchase a ticket in order to join. This intended to allow users to monetize Spaces and incentivize them to host more live-audio conversations on Twitter.
Hosts will earn the majority of revenue from ticket sales while Twitter will keep a small amount, the company said. Ticket Spaces will begin to roll out to a limit set of users in the coming months.
