Twitter is known as the online ‘town square’ of the world, a place where groups of people can come and air their grievances, opinions and fears and hold live discussions.
It started with the text format, back in 2006. Audio was added 14 years later.
However, it fell short of a real town square because you couldn’t actually see the person or persons you were interacting with.
But that’s about to change as the platform is all set to add video support sometime this month, going by comments made by owner Elon Musk in a discussion on Sunday.
“This feature is helpful as you can see the body language of the person as I speak if he/she is opted in to show video. That way, more information can be conveyed if you’re able to see their face or body language.”
"We hope to release that functionality before the end of the year but certainly by early next year," Musk added.
CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed it as well which was then followed by X designer Andrea Conway who tweeted that she “just called someone on X.” The post was accompanied by several “mind-blown” emojis, hinting at the designer’s excitement for the upcoming feature.
Musk said the limitations of Spaces as a product were brought home to him when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis chose the platform to announce his entry to the Republican presidential nomination race in May this year.
“The Ron DeSantis situation broke out rather embarrassingly and since then we’ve been putting massive work into making Spaces actually robust where at this point, you can have millions of people listening simultaneously.”
Breaking New Ground
While this may seem like yet another app starting to offer video, in truth, it goes beyond that.
The key difference between apps like Zoom, Google Meet and WhatsApp offering video calling, and Twitter doing so is that Twitter is essentially designed as a one-to-the-world communication platform, while the others are primarily meant as one-to-one or group calling platforms.
The closest competitors to video-enable Twitter Spaces are Facebook Live and YouTube Live. However, these are again designed as platforms to broadcast oneself.
Twitter Video Spaces will be a platform to hold discussions – a bit like Zoom – but a video discussion that can be easily discovered and joined by strangers who may be interested in the topic, making it unlike anything else in existence today.