Clubhouse lives! With updates few and far in between, Clubhouse finally hits us with something new today in the form of its ‘Wave Bar’. The new feature is said to encourage more direct social interaction in the app by displaying which among your connections are online at any given time, allowing you to send a wave to prompt them that you’re game for a quick chat. Interestingly, it sounds exactly like what Facebook introduced many, many years ago.
Do The Wave
The Wave Bar is said to be placed somewhere along the top of your screen. It looks very similar to how an Instagram Story Feed looks, displaying each of your connections who are online. Over most options offered by other platforms, Clubhouse’s version only displays connections who are online, as opposed to the standard model of displaying all your connections and marking those who are online with some sort of indicator.
As Clubhouse explains:
“Now, you can simply wave at friends and invite them to chat. Waves will now open social rooms instead of private rooms so that friends of speakers can join the conversation and speakers can ping in friends. There’s also a new ping bar at the top of social rooms so you can ping friends in quickly.”
Users also get to pick if they want to lock their chats or not, allowing them to maintain higher levels of privacy. As noted, it’s mainly just another way to encourage more direct interaction on the app, besides the whole passive listening experience, which, ironically, was its main hyp element before it was eventually released. It’s a fairly logical option for Clubhouse right now and could even be a significantly beneficial one, provided that it was released in time to help salvage the few users that still use the platform. We don’t mean that the app is dead, just that the user-base has fallen much since its initial days, but the majority of that was due to lack of content quality & control measures.
On that note, you wouldn’t expect the Wave Bar to be full for a lot of users, save for those with the most number of contacts. While Clubhouse seems to have been overtaken by Twitter on the audio social front, it does continue to gain users, mostly in developing regions. It may yet serve as a key connective platform in nations where many languages are spoken, taking into consideration potential comprehension and literacy barriers, of course.
The Wrap
This, along with other, more specific use cases, Clubhouse might have finally found its premiere niche, despite losing much of its original hype and novelty. The new Wave Bar works to only further reinforce Clubhouse’s newly established strengths, allowing it to build upon these discoveries over time. Hopefully, the platform stays around and matures long enough for it to witness all that authentic social media growth has to offer. Certainly though, there at least seems to be a spot for Clubhouse in the future of digital connection.
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