After steadily expanding access throughout the year, Twitter announced that its voice chat room feature known as Twitter Spaces is now open to anyone wishing to host a space across iOS and Android.
Earlier this year, the company had limited access to Spaces hosting accounts with at least 600 followers, saying it found those accounts were more likely to have a good experience because they had an existing audience.
The platform now says that the option is offered to all mobile users via its app. Users can start their first space by clicking the Create button – the button they might use to post a Tweet, according to the graphic shared alongside the ad.
The platform was previously experimenting with giving Spaces its own tab in the app. But this has not been widely publicized, nor is it shown in the current image shared with the ad.
The company has been trying to boost Spaces since launching it in beta last year. More recently, Spaces hosts have been given the ability to add two co-hosts and up to 10 speakers. This allowed for larger events with more oversight.
The company has created a fund for Spaces content creators called the Spark Program. I also tried Ticketed Spaces, which are sound rooms that require you to pay to enter.
The Stories feature, called Fleets, has also closed this summer. This makes Spaces the only product to appear in the top row of its mobile app.
Since the announcement of Spaces, several major platforms have launched their own voice networking products. This follows the spread of the social audio app Clubhouse, which became a popular pastime during the height of the pandemic.
Twitter users who are in beta testing of another new feature called Communities instead see the Communities button in the middle of the app’s navigation row.
Spaces and Clubhouse are now competing with Live Voice Rooms across Facebook, Spotify, Greenroom, Discord, Reddit, and more.
The platform says the dedicated Spaces tab was recently expanded to include more people in English via iOS, but it’s not yet available on Android.
