Clubhouse - The Next-Gen Social Media!

Clubhouse is an audio-based social networking app launched in April 2020 for iOS devices and has started gaining popularity since then. The app was co-developed by Paul Davison and ex-Google employee Rohan Seth, with an investment of about $12 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The app's valuation reached about $100 million in May 2020, and by January 2021, it reached $1 billion.

What is it about, basically?

The app is basically about you signing up and selecting your interests from various fields presented, which will help develop ideas along with meeting, discussing, and sharing your stories with people who share similar interests and ideas as you. As the app is voice-only, the interactions will occur through podcasts to listen to it and get your queries answered.

The app features public and private conversation rooms where one can Livestream conversation. Each room has moderators, and one can join a room only when approved by moderators. Moderators control speaking privileges, though listeners can get to speak by "raising their hand." The app has no support for photos and videos except profile pictures of users, and also, the conversations aren't recorded.

Why the hype?

Although the app started gaining popularity initially, it made its way to the news when famous entrepreneur Elon Musk hosted a conversation room with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. The room soon reached its maximum capacity, and the event was also streamed on Youtube.

The app announced its upcoming features like tipping, tickets, and subscriptions to directly pay creators. The app has also focused on improving its servers and building its android app.

Due to the app's closed beta, its invites are a hot topic in the market. The membership is being sold on platforms such as Reddit, eBay, and Craiglist. The average invite price ranges from $20 to $50, whereas it has reached $125 over eBay. As the app is valued at $1 billion, it has made its way to the list of unicorn startups such as SpaceX, Uber, and Telegram.

Seeing the app's success and attention has prompted Facebook to plan to launch a similar product.

Recently, the app reached 8 million downloads on the iOS App Store.

How can you be part of it?

As the app is currently in its beta-testing phase, the only way you can join it is by getting an invite by the app member, and the invite will be eligible only if you have iOS devices. The app has plans to expand to the general public soon.

Privacy issue

Being a big thing on the internet, the app is also receiving some uninvited attention. One user was able to stream audio from Clubhouse rooms to his own website. Since then, the user has been banned, and the company has promised that they would focus more on the app's security after this incident. The user was discovered when cybersecurity experts spotted that the audio and metadata were being transferred from Clubhouse to another site.

The Stanford Internet Observatory has confirmed that Agora, a China-based company, supplies back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse app. SIO has also figured out that a user's unique Clubhouse ID number and chatroom ID are transmitted in plaintext, and a higher possibility of Agora having access to the user's raw audio, which eventually provides access to the Chinese government.

Recently, the app faced a data breach when a Chinese programmer developed an android-based third-party app that allowed anyone to listen to audio on Clubhouse without an invite code with access to various personal sessions and made its source code available on Github. The app, along with its third-party access, has been blocked.