Twitter’s quest to give users anything else to do on the app besides post and like tweets continues.
The latest stop in that journey is the ability to keep Twitter Spaces around for posterity after they’re over. Spaces is a live audio feature that the platform started rolling out late last year.
Twitter is now starting to allow hosts of the live audio chats to record said chats and post shareable links, giving users a way to tune in and hear whatever great contributions to society were made after the fact. Recording is only available for some iOS and Android users at the moment, but will roll out to more folks over the next several weeks.
When starting a Twitter Space, the host will have to opt into recording it up-front. Everyone who attends as listeners or speakers will see an onscreen notification that it’s being recorded, so nobody will be surprised if their idle audio chatter is listenable later on. Twitter will keep its own copy of a recorded Space for up to 120 days afterward if it needs to be checked for rule violations, but a host can delete the recording from public access at any time.
If this sounds suspiciously close to just making a podcast that’s only available on Twitter for some reason, that’s basically what it is. The main difference is that it’s sorta hard to connect a professional-grade microphone to a smartphone (you can only create Spaces on mobile right now), so a large majority of recorded Spaces will sound markedly worse than a podcast. That said, some creators can at least charge money for them, so there’s that.
Spaces are far from the worst of Twitter’s innovations, as they inoffensively sit at the top of the timeline while they’re live and are otherwise easy to ignore. Still, it’s easy to wonder why Twitter is leaning so hard into a feature that mostly seemed like a reaction to Clubhouse when it first launched, and hasn’t really become a staple of the Twitter experience since then.
At the end of the day, if you want to start a podcast, you don’t need to rely on Twitter’s mobile infrastructure to do that. Maybe just get a decent mic and do it the conventional way. Your listeners’ ears will thank you.
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