After spending quite a bit of time playing around in @TwitterSpaces as a host (as well as being an early user of Clubhouse), my thoughts:

1/ People LIVE on Twitter, and in some cases, have spent 10+ years building followings based on their voice / perspective. The ability to launch a space and bring your following together is huge. On Clubhouse, it can take a long time to build an authentic following from scratch.

2/ From what I’ve seen on CH, celebrities build instant followings. For everyone else (even those with established creds), it can take many hours of speaking in rooms to achieve the same. Spaces leverages your existing following / social graph.

3/ How many people have you “met” on Twitter but have never actually spoken to? Spaces allows you to bring those folks together. Really humanizes the overall Twitter experience.

4/ A few notes on features. Spaces minimizes elegantly so you can continue to use Twitter easily and multi-task. Other audio apps force you to change screens often - this is really seamless. They have also embedded DMs and “view profile” really well.

5/ Social audio has excluded the deaf community. Twitter Spaces launched with room transcription - it can use some work (and they can likely find a way to improve its placement onscreen) but overall, a game changing feature. (I hate that I’m saying “you know” in this screenshot)

6/ The ability to send emoji reactions (that last a few seconds) to the host or to other people you follow in the room is great. This is notably missing for Clubhouse.

7/ Spaces cannot be named. They are, by default, named after the host. This may sound limiting but I, for one, love it. It discourages “click bait” room titles which has been a huge problem on Clubhouse and allows for the topics of the room to flow naturally.

8/ Spaces features a “tweet board,” allowing folks in the room to share any public tweet to the board for reference. It’s an engaging feature, allowing everyone to view the same content for purposes of context and discussion.

9/ The moderation tools could use some work. The host cannot mute speakers, which can be chaotic. It takes too many clicks / screens to invite a listener to be a speaker. They allow the host to “block and boot” someone from the space, but these 2 items should be disaggregated.

10/ A few other small UI / UX notes: it is impossible to see which speakers are muted or unmuted (easy fix). When there are many speakers in the room, you see “+20” instead of their names (you should be able to scroll for more names). There can only be 10 speakers at a time.

11/ Overall, I’m really impressed. There are so many social audio apps out there, and Twitter can leverage the best of its existing platform (tweets/content, direct messaging, existing follower / social graphs), to compete with the best of them.