Twitter Is Becoming a Podcast App

Twitter has launched a test version of Twitter Spaces today that includes podcasts, "letting you listen to full shows through curated playlists based on your interests," reports The Verge. From the report: The redesigned Spaces tab opens with Stations, topic-based playlists combining podcast episodes pulled from RSS with Twitter's social audio events and recordings. It functions like a Pandora station but for spoken word and is pretty different from the a la carte listening podcast consumers are used to on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Live and upcoming spaces are still in the tab, further down the page. The test will roll out to a random group of users across the world, initially only in English. The more users listen, the more tailored the audio Stations will become. But Twitter isn't starting from square one -- the company is relying on what it already knows about its users' interests to curate the playlists. It'll draw from the interests of people they follow, as well. "What we're really trying to capture here is as if it's like another user recommending you something," Twitter senior product manager Evan Jones, who focuses on audio, told Hot Pod. Podcast discovery is notoriously difficult, limited either to top 100 charts, hand-picked selections on apps, or -- more often than not -- word of mouth. No platform has managed to crack it, yet. It's easy to imagine the promotional possibilities around being able to share and listen to podcasts in the same app, but it's not quite there yet. The test does not yet have a clipping capability, and listening can only happen in the Spaces tab, not on the timeline. That being said, Spaces has a clipping feature that could be applied to podcasts at some point.

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