Clubhouse may fade. Group voice chat is here to stay

ONE OF SILICON VALLEY’S most successful inventions is hype. It usually disappoints. In 2015 live-streaming from smartphones became all the rage. But Meerkat, an app which pioneered it, shut down the following year. On April 1st Periscope, its more successful rival, did too (no joke). Will Clubhouse, a buzzy app that hosts live audio gabfests, suffer the same fate?Launched at the start of the pandemic last March, Clubhouse quickly became Silicon Valley’s most-talked-about app and a favourite stage for rock-star entrepreneurs. Elon Musk offered his views on colonising Mars and rewiring the brain to thousands of listeners. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of a big venture-capital firm, regularly hold forth. More mortal Valleyites discuss everything from the future of San Francisco to the testy relations between tech and the media. This year the Clubhouse craze went global, offering a venue for frank conversations in places from Saudi Arabia to South Korea.