Image Courtesy: Business Standard
Clubhouse, which unwittingly pushed every other digital site from Spotify to Facebook rushing for copycat capabilities, appears to be moving away from pure live audio experiences. What evidence do we have? Late last week, the firm appears to have unintentionally disclosed a communications tool dubbed Backchannel to certain customers.
According to numerous tweets that circulated on Friday (including the screen recording below), Backchannel is an obvious way for users to talk using text rather than voice. The functionality was apparently not mentioned at all in the app’s release notes for the update, and what was sent out appears to be clearly incomplete. It’s unclear how long this version of Backchannel was available in the wild, although Clubhouse appeared to delete it quickly.
A business spokesman told The Verge that “as part of our product creation process, Clubhouse frequently examines and tests possible functionality.” These functionalities are sometimes included in the app, and sometimes they are not. We don’t make any predictions about future features.” They stated that the Clubhouse founders occasionally discuss the product plan during weekly Sunday Town Halls.
The extent of the deployment is unknown because, once again, the feature appeared to be available for a brief period of time, making it difficult to determine whether it was just noticed by a few users who happened to have the app open at the time, or whether it was only supposed to go out as a restricted beta. In any case, what’s the point of calling a feature Backchannel and then dumping it in the lap of the entire world?
