In the past few hours, a document that has come into the possession of the always careful Bloomberg magazine has made it possible to ascertain the plans for the disposal, by Facebook, of its initiatives dedicated to the world of audio.
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A little less than a year ago, in full Clubhouse mania, almost all the social giants equipped themselves with a function capable of focusing on audio, often through sound rooms then recorded pro podcasts (as in the case of Twitter and its Spaces). The social Facebook, for its part, was not limited to a single initiative, but launched a whole package of sound innovations which, however, now, with the fashion gone, and priorities changed, they are about to be stopped without mercy.
The well-known Bloomberg portal, which had already recently shared several signs of how interest in podcasts had waned, with Meta increasingly focused on the Metaverse, its viewers, and pumping in every sauce of the Reels, short, vertical videos, creatives, in TikTok style, in the past few hours has come into possession of a communication sent by Menlo Park to the partners, from which several concrete moves are inferred, which put an end to what was announced just a few months earlier.
First of all, from this week no new podcasts will be added and, from the next 3 June, therefore in a month, those already uploaded will also be removed. Menlo Park will not bother to warn users: this task, in the forms they deem most appropriate, will be delegated to the publishers themselves.
Another victim of the new Meta course for Facebook involves audio bites, short sound clips shared in the feed with the name of Soundbytes: support will also be removed from these contents and, specifically, this will also happen through the removal of the audio hub. dedicated to them. In this regard, a spokesperson for the platform, who then commented on the decisions as a whole with the classic routine motivation (the functions offered are regularly evaluated, to focus on offering the most significant ones), specified that this deduction will take place in the next weeks.
Last but not least, the precise clone of the Clubhouse audio chats, the Live Audio Rooms will be absorbed into the Facebook Live function and, ipso facto, the user will not have to do anything else, in starting a live, than to determine if he will also want it with the accompanying video, or only with sound approval.