I heard about Clubhouse sometime late last year through the various accounts I follow on Instagram. Many of the influencers I follow would talk about it and comment via their stories on the good but mainly how pretentious the platform was. I confess I have an android device and did not know anyone who had Clubhouse, so I did not know whom to ask for an invite. So practically I had 2 strikes against me in an attempt to test out the platform and forgot about it.
Fast forward to Memorial Day weekend and my family came to visit from NYC, FL, and LA to celebrate my cousin's birthday and double up as to having our first family reunion post-Covid-19 restrictions. One of my cousin’s friends also attended that weekend and guess what — invited me to Clubhouse. (Clubhouse now had an Android version)
CLUBHOUSE
I soon joined and to be honest, it was refreshing to hear people speak at length about anything. It was the people-watching opportunity I had been yearning for since I moved to Dallas back in January. I was not impressed though with the android version of ClubHouse, I mean is this is the best $110 million funding can do? (Crunchbase) But I continued to press on by adding people and listening to various rooms, hoping to find a worthwhile gem. It took me 2 weeks to be exact before I finally found some good rooms. The rooms vary in topics from cryptocurrency, dating, and self-marketing. I found the latter of the two to be hysterically funny and very informative. I finally thought to myself that my creepy listening in various rooms was finally paying off.
So I eventually improved my profile to make it more attractive and continued to add people steady. I am not sure if it is true or not, but the word is, the more people you add that you like the better exposure of rooms you are more likely to be interested in joining will appear. I took that with a grain of salt and continued to have faith in the app’s benefits.
Three weeks have passed since I joined CH and I started to enter rooms more frequently where the CH influencers would host rooms to listen in. For some, I started following them on Twitter. In particular, I started following Chris Bourdeau. He’s a data engineer who is very well versed in many topics and has a good temperature reading on the plus and minuses of CH potential. Then the very next day he posted on Twitter announcing he’s on Greenhouse from Spotify. I knew exactly what it was and what it meant, so I jumped in.
GreenRoom — by Spotify
Of course, joining GreenRoom the first two rooms I saw were 1.Bill Simmons “NBA Talk” and 2. Clubhouse vs GreenRoom. I joined the later room and it was filled by CH folks all sharing notes on their thoughts of GreenRoom and where they stand. After jumping in and out I joined a room with my friend DJ FeFlo to test the features and agree it has potential.
Today is day #2 of GreenRoom and learned it is a carryover of what use to be Locker. The Clubhouse vs GreenRoo rooms are still alive still discussing why one platform is better than the other. So with no further ado here is a list of things that have been discussed the most.
GreenRoom Today
- You can chat
- 1 owner of a room
- Profiles of users include a feature called Gems, considered as a form of social approval by. You can give someone gems by clicking on their profile picture
- Rooms are gaming the system by gemming people up by creating rooms where users focus on 1 user to gem them up to a certain number — gems are infinite as far as we know and the assumption is that it will mean something in the future
- No need to PTR (Pull to Refresh) in reference to profile pics vs CH
- You can change the title of the room when needed
- The audience area of a room is listed based on your last name. Some have changed their last names to AAAA to be at the top
- Much better-looking app than Clubhouse
- Still glitchy, even with the experience of Lockeroom. Needs to be reset by closing and opening the application when it doesn’t work
- You cannot browse other rooms while you are in a room vs. Clubhouse
- If you are on stage and happen to leave the room then decide to re-enter the room you left you can get right back on stage without having to get pulled back in
- Android users are at a disadvantage again with many of the features including chat not being available
- Giving gems away is difficult to tell on Android, you only know if you have the notification sound on and hear the chime go off
- When there are more than 100 people on stage the app get glitchy, so you keep it under 75 to keep a room running smoothly
- The owner of the room cannot control the mute button on folks who are on stage so their only option is to push them back into the audience or kick them out
- You can record a room and it shows a timer of how long the room has been live, otherwise, there is no timer
- If the owner of the room leaves the whole room shuts down, must give up ownership of the room to keep the room alive
- App shuts down at random, android
- When giving Gems away on an android the Gem number has a lag to update
Potential
- Monetization opportunity as it is backed by Spotify, better software integrations possibilities as it has better resources to develop and a major player in the audio distribution
- Recording and posting as podcast opportunities
- Multi business media cohesion
- # of gems will determine what rooms you will be allowed to enter and monetization potential
- People can get in “trouble” if they join a room thinking it is about one thing based on the title and it changes to something that does not a reflection of who they are
- Chatting can be distracting, but the UX design increases user stickiness toward using the application
Still waiting on
- Regional, country filters
- Better profile set up, links need to be clickable
- Profile pic database
- If someone invites you to a room, on Android you see it in the notifications but it does not take you to the room just the app
- If you know the name of the room or person who is in a room you cannot find either to join them
- Artist/Podcaster linking to Spotify platform aka. become integrated into the Spotify app
- How do you monetize certain services when it is set up for US customers. For example, many users on clubhouse are from India, what if they show interest in purchasing services from content creators in the US but cannot afford them? Thus, the 1 price fits all model does not work
What did I miss? What are your thoughts? Do you like Clubhouse more over Greenroom? or Vice Versa? Where should you invest your time moving forward? Can both apps thrive at the same time?
#spotify #clubhouse #socialmedia #greenroom #android