Twitter began the year by purchasing the Breaker app, an app that helps you to connect with podcasts and making it easy to "like" and vote on episodes, find new podcasts, follow friends, post favorite shows on social networks and many other features.
Breaker was founded in 2016, when the podcast boom we see today has not yet existed. Just yesterday, we commented that Amazon was now purchasing a podcast platform to compete with Spotify, which is important to its plan. Despite its fascinating strategy, Twitter has suggested that it is not going to keep it alive.
In reality, the company is going to shut down in an accelerated manner. Twitter is not as involved in podcasting itself as in the hardware and employees of Breaker, so it will deactivate it on 15 June. The whole Breaker team will join Twitter to, as the social network has announced, "improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter" and collaborate on a new Twitter Spaces project, a social network focused exclusively on Twitter audio that has been tested for a few weeks and that will enable users to talk in real time via speech.
However, it is not easy to start, when the organization also needs to address technological challenges and, above all, ensure that the dialogue can be moderated to try to prevent abuse and harassment on the forum. Prohibited written content recognition protocols are not valid for speech systems, so Twitter faces a big technological challenge if it wishes to ensure the protection of consumers of its audio channel.
Interestingly, Telegram recently introduced audio chats in communities, a feature that bears a certain resemblance to what Twitter wants to launch. The Breaker team and the technologies they have created will lead to making Twitter Spaces a reality. Its creative officer, Leah Culver, will also join the Twitter Spaces board, along with CEO Erik Berlin and the rest of the directors of the podcasting app.