the room(s) where it happened
App-smashing and meta-data help give content creators their shot
So this happened yesterday.
When the news broke, I was in the middle of playing around with Twitter’s new voice tweet feature, which allows you to record audio and tweet it out to the masses. In my last post, I wrote about Clubhouse, a buzzy new social audio app whose quick rise foreshadowed Twitter going on the offensive to blunt any encroachments on its turf. In fact, Twitter has been on a buying spree of late.
It recently bought companies which power both Spaces, its new Clubhouse-like social audio app, as well as other startups offering video and now with Revue, newsletter content creation. As a content creator, having one unified platform to craft content would be a game changer, especially given Twitter’s global reach, and that it’s the platform I’ve spent the most time with, having been on it since 2006, and garnering the most followers of any other like-minded social media site. It’s likely that some form of monetization, maybe micro-payments or subscriptions, might also be forthcoming.
Of course I spent the beginning of last year importing all my old blog posts from Wordpress and Revue into the site you’re reading now. Should I reverse course and go back to the (news)room where it used to happen?
App-smashing and meta-data are where it now happens
If you’re not familiar, app-smashing is where you take two different apps, and use them simultaneously, or together to make something new out of it. So for the above example, I was crafting a voice tweet about Spaces, and using it to comment on another twitter user who was going to talk about these new features in a Clubhouse room later that night. On a previous night, I was composing backchannel commentary via Discord on a Clubhouse panel discussion. Finally, a person I had introduced to Clubhouse who runs Twitter hashtag chats used an audio room to facilitate running commentary about the tweet stream he was hosting live. It all sounds like a portmanteau cocktail bender, but this is content creation 2021-style. Cross-platform agility and the ability to re-purpose one bit of content on another platform might be the currency one needs to navigate shifting currents in the Big Tech attention economy wars of the post-Trump era.
Regarding meta-data, last weekend I participated in a hackathon organized (mostly) entirely on Clubhouse. The output for my idea was an external event calendar for Clubhouse rooms. My reason? I’d like to know when rooms get scheduled. That’s meta-data. In my few weeks strolling the virtual halls of Clubhouse, I’ve been taking note of other meta-data like room title, how many attendees, how many hosts, who is attending, and when they are occurring. At the same time, I’m reading about a new class of startup companies whose mission is to help provide utilities or tools to help creators grow and manage their fledging businesses. Collecting info like this for analytics falls into that arena of data science which also interests me on both a personal and professional level.
In closing, I never get tired of these Bernie memes.
