Rise and shine! It’s Monday! You probably know what I’m covering today — it’s the voice-only social app that has everyone clamoring for an invite. But first…
The headlines:
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🚗 Tesla is reportedly laying off more than 10% of its staff.
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📹 Adobe is working on generative video but it won’t reveal when it will launch.
Can this new voice-first app carve out a piece of the social networking market?
If you think of Clubhouse (the asynchronous voice-based chat room app that took off in the early days of the pandemic), and combine it with the serendipity of Twitter’s timeline, you’ll start to get the idea behind Airchat, the latest social app on everyone’s lips.
Originally hacked together last year, Airchat is built by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder executive Brian Norgard. They then rebuilt the app and launched it over the weekend for both iOS and Android. To say it took social media by storm would be putting it lightly.
Airchat is currently invite-only (with invites turned off; more on that later) and sits at #27 on the app store for social networking. When you first open Airchat, you’ll notice that messages automatically start playing. From there, you can scroll a timeline filled with people sharing their thoughts, and you can quickly interact by replying in your voice, liking a note, and even reposting ones to your own profile.
It’s not really limited to just voice, either. You can swap between voice and video messages, and you can even add images to your post after the fact. Still, most people are zoned in on the voice chat functionality, and given the tagline “a social walkie-talkie,” it’s fair to assume that voice is the big play here.
One of the more interesting quirks is that voice notes automatically play at 2x the normal speed. I imagine this is to make it easier for users to consume and interact with more content, especially since the app lends itself to voice-led essays quite well. This was okay for me, but if it feels unnatural to you, you can reset the speed by holding down the play button.
Now, about the invite system. Like a lot of social media apps that launch today to some hype, Airchat only opened the door to those who a current user has invited. However, due to a sudden influx of users, the team has shut down invitations temporarily until they can scale up.
Social is a hard market to break through, over the last half-decade we have so many new takes on connecting people come and go with varying degrees of influence left over. Will Airchat be any different? It’s hard to tell. What do you think?
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