Clubhouse's Experimental 'Wave Bar' Highlights Online Friends
Clubhouse is experimenting with a new feature called Wave Bar that's supposed to help users of the audio-focused social platform figure out if any of their friends are looking to chat.
Wave Bar is based on the Wave feature that Clubhouse released in September 2021, which allows people to invite their friends to one-on-one chats with the press of a button.
Waving at someone was previously a multi-step process that required Clubhouse users to find their friends in public rooms, open a sub-menu, and tap on the friend's Wave icon. Now all they have to do is tap on a friend's avatar in the prominent Wave Bar at the top of the screen.
"Waves will now open social rooms instead of private rooms, so that friends of speakers can join the conversation, and speakers can ping in friends," Clubhouse says. "There’s also a new ping bar at the top of social rooms so you can ping friends in quickly."
A word of caution: Clubhouse users looking to initiate one-on-one chats now have to use the "new lock room button" to make their conversations private. People who got used to a Wave opening a private room should make note of this change before using the Wave Bar.
The introduction of the Wave Bar follows Clubhouse's decision to add support for text-based chats in late February. It also comes after other social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, introduced audio-focused tools of their own to compete with Clubhouse.
That competition appears to have reduced Clubhouse's appeal, with CNBC reporting in November 2021 that its daily user count in the UK had "dropped from 550,000 in February to 160,000 in September, according to data from app analysis firm App Annie."
It makes sense, then, for Clubhouse to make it easier for users to
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