Facebook wants its own Clubhouse: it’s the Hotline

If there’s one app that hit hard at the start of 2021, it’s ClubHouse, and it’s not even officially available on Android. Facebook must have looked at her from the side and of course they weren’t going to sit idly by: they are already testing HotLine, a slightly different competitor.

Facebook does not want to lose any trend, and in its history, we have seen how it has not hesitated to take out its wallet, or directly copy the functions of other applications into its own software, taking advantage of its billions of dollars. active users.

Seeing the attraction of ClubHouse and its pop-up chat rooms, it was only a matter of time before they took action, and they already have: their latest app in testing. is called Hotline, and it was created by the NPE Team Experimental Projects Department within the company (New Product Experiment).

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Hotline wants to become Facebook’s clubhouse

Hotline is not exactly like Clubhouse and they also want to differentiate themselves from Twitter spaces. In this case, “room” participants can use both video and audio when asking questions, but audio remains the protagonist.

The users who participate in these conversations can decide to be only listeners or as active participants, and the operation of the hotline is based on the live question and answer format.

Now another very noticeable difference from the Clubhouse is that in Hotline these conversations would not be fleeting and would not go away at the end of sessions. Hotline automatically records conversations, which can lead to later sharing or, for example, taking advantage of these audios to publish them in podcast format. This, on the other hand, also eliminates the FOMO Clubhouse by having to be present at the talks to find out what we talked about.

For the moment Hotline is nothing more than an experimental project within Facebook, and is directed by Eric Hazzard, who developed the “tbh” application and was bought by Facebook in 2017. We’ll see if it continues its development or ends up being integrated into other applications of the social network.