SAN FRANCISCO – My own interest in Clubhouse rose and depleted pretty fast for me, but there’s still a few who still use the app to chat and network. So, for those who still use it, there are new features that users weren’t able to do before – including Universal Search, Clips, and a couple others.
Clubhouse announced that you can now actually search for the rooms you want to find. The Search feature – which, for some reason, wasn’t there before – also lets you look for people, clubs, and future events. This makes it easier for you to find stuff in Clubhouse about specific topics.
It’s already rolled out on both iOS and Android. However, Clubhouse mentioned that it will stay there as a feature “for the first week or two” while they compile feedback from the community.
This feature has only rolled out in beta, but it’s probably the most exciting of the new features. Clips will allow anyone to share 30-second clips of public rooms “so more people on the Internet can discover and join your club”.
This means that Clubhouse might be hoping that these sharable clips would entice people to get back into the app.
According to Clubhouse, you can choose whether you want Clips enabled when you start a room. They’ll be on by default for open/public rooms – but you can toggle them off anytime. However, they are not available for private, social or club rooms.
To grab the last 30 seconds of a clip, you can tap the scissors icon at anytime during a chat. You’re then able to share Clips of your show to most social media sites, or save them to your camera roll.
They’re currently only testing with a “small group of creators”. While it’s still in beta, it’s expected to roll out to more users.
This might come as a surprise to a lot of us. Clubhouse has previously prohibited the “recording, transcribing or otherwise reproducing, manipulating and/or sharing of information without the express authorisation or permission of Clubhouse and all users that originated the content”.
Clubhouse soared in popularity when most people have been social distancing due to Covid-19. Now that people are starting to go out again, there isn’t a need for a lot of us to socialise online anymore – which could explain why the app has been less popular these days.
Other new features include Replays – which can help you listen back to audio conversations you might have missed, and Spatial Audio for Android. Previously, Spatial Audio was only available for iOS users.
Twitter’s Clubhouse copycat, Spaces, is also introducing Replay to their users. Users will be able to “set some rules” for their Spaces session and “lock” rules. For now, the “rules” that you can enlist are unclear.
