Clubhouse Introduces New 'Wave Bar' to Boost Direct In-App Engagement

Clubhouse is experimenting with a new 'Wave Bar' at the top of your screen that will show who among your connections are online, allowing you to send them a wave to let them know you're available for a chat.

The Wave Bar, as seen here, resembles a Stories feed, displaying each of your contacts online at the time.

According to Clubhouse:

“Now, you can simply wave at friends and invite them to chat. 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. There’s also a new ping bar at the top of social rooms so you can ping friends in quickly.”

If you want to keep your conversation more private, you can also lock it.

It's yet another method to drive more direct engagement in the app rather than passive listening. And it appears to be a reasonable and helpful idea - only if you're still using Clubhouse anyway.

With the Clubhouse buzz fading, most users are either drifting away from the audio rooms process or migrating to Twitter Spaces instead, hence you can anticipate the wave bar to be sparsely populated.

However, Clubhouse continues to grow in popularity, primarily in developing countries, and it may play a key connecting function in countries where a variety of languages are spoken, yet there is a divide between those who can comprehend what they hear yet couldn't understand the texts.

Although no longer being the popular social app of the day, Clubhouse may have discovered a home in this and other use cases.

The Wave Bar may serve to emphasize this, as well as encourage the app's continued progress.

The Wave Bar is presently being tested with a small group of iOS and Android users.