The first of these new audio features Facebook Live Audio Rooms
Starting off the conversation is the Clubhouse competitor called Live Audio Rooms. With these rooms, people will be able to live stream audio conversations between different individuals. The speaker will be accompanied by audience members who listen in. When this feature first launched earlier this year, it was restricted to certain people like public figures, but it expanded to more people across the US and globally. Now, these audio rooms are available to groups.
Facebook plans on expanding its podcast service
Among the new audio features, Facebook also pointed to podcasts. Other companies like Spotify are investing in the podcasting industry. People are able to listen to their favorite podcasts natively on Facebook. The only issue is that distribution is still rather limited. People can only get access to podcasts via Facebook if they live in the US. Though this is true, Facebook did say that it plans on expanding it to other markets. We don’t know when that will happen, and the company hasn’t said just when we should expect this.
Soundbites are also expanding to more users
Facebook developed an interesting means of posting content. A few months ago, the company launched its Soundbites. This is a feature where people record short audio clips and post them for people to hear. Facebook stated that this is like an audio version of Instagram reels, which is not far from the truth. So far, it seemed that the company was just testing out the feature with a few creators, as it wasn’t widely available to start off. Now, however, it’s available to more people in the US. Apparently, it did well enough during the testing phase, and we should start seeing more soundbites throughout our feeds in the coming weeks.
Facebook has faced multiple outages in the past week
Other Facebook news has to do with strange outages that the company suffered over the last week. First, the company suffered a horrible outage where Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp all went down for about 6 hours. After everything was back online, we thought it was all done with. However, a few days ago, the company suffered another outage where Instagram also went down. The company blamed the outages on “a faulty configuration change.”
