Some will consider it yet another cannibalization of the big on the small. But to look closely at the arrival of Twitter Spaces has a completely different profile: because if it is true that many geeks have become passionate about the social voice-only Club House, discovering the taste of voice conversation, all or almost the other platforms had already implemented or were implementing this method of sharing: Telegram, even if very few have ever used it, but in some way also Facebook and now Twitter.
Jack Dorsey’s microblogging platform is preparing to launch Twitter Spaces in Italy, which replicates Club House throughout, adding a series of features, some of which are still under construction. An opportunity for those who have already built a good fan base and on this can develop more popular relationship opportunities than Club House, where followers must be won from scratch and, not negligible, you can still enter by invitation and only with a iphone (or ipad latest version).
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The cradle of the social
The launch is scheduled for days and there is an Italian to fine-tune the last details of Twitter Spaces: Maria de Lourdes Zollo, 26 years old from Parma, in 2019 he launched together with a mini-team of seven people led by Esther Crowford and Ethan Sutin, Squad: “accelerated” messaging app from Y Combinator, one of the most active in Silicon Valley. Initially Squad also envisaged the video camera but then the idea of a communication that enhanced the intimacy of only verbal and imageless communication emerged. Squad was born like other social networks in the university context, which is best for testing and for making things that work go viral (especially when budgets are low). As with Facebook, the Ivy League universities represented the hunting ground for Squad fans at the beginning.
Born in Caracas to a Venezuelan mother but raised in Parma, after graduating in Milan in International Relations she flies to Australia and then to Shenzen in China, to work in Tencent Games, the video game division of the Chinese giant known among other things for WeChat. “Thanks also to my bilingualism, I was given the task of launching the products in Europe and South America – explains Maria Zollo -. Over time I have developed the need for experience in a start up. I moved to London where I worked on Musical.ly, which later became Tik Tok, so I was in charge of partnerships. That’s where Squad was born ”.
The voice and diversity
The start-up has carried out several psychological analyzes on people who go live on social media, discovering that people to feel free to express themselves: “People love to talk without masks, therefore without cameras, without needing to conform from an aesthetic point of view – Continue Zollo -. Removing frills, removing the fear of performing, of being seen and judged for one’s appearance offers great freedom. This enhances the communicative potential of all those who have content to share, to tell, to describe with their storytelling skills. But we also found that this enhances diversity: it doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is, but what you say; it doesn’t matter if you are beautiful or ugly or if you are disabled but what you communicate and how you communicate it. In this way we found that we gave a voice to people who do not have it. Let’s take the women in the tech sector, adds Zollo: too few and often far from the control levers. With the result of having social networks designed by men for men. “