Twitter Spaces hosts will be able to share clips from recordings in new test

Twitter is testing a new feature for its Spaces audio rooms that allows a host to share a clip of recorded Spaces on their timeline. The feature is now available to “certain Hosts on iOS.” Everyone on iOS can see and listen to clips, while those on Android and the web will be able to “real soon,” according to Twitter. Clips will live on Twitter for 30 days, company spokesperson Joseph J. Nuñez said in a statement to The Verge.

Twitter is limiting clips only to Spaces hosts for now, though the company plans to expand Spaces clipping functionality to “everyone on Twitter in the near future,” Nuñez said. However, it’s all too easy to imagine an ill-intentioned listener taking a clip and spreading it in a malicious way on Twitter, so we’ll have to wait and see if Twitter introduces tools to prevent the misuse of clips once the feature is available more widely.

Clips are already quite useful on other platforms — they’re a handy way to share digestible bits of information or content. I personally associate them most with Twitch — I’ve watched a lot of clips of notable moments from streams in lieu of trying to scrub through an hours-long recording of a stream. YouTube is testing a similar feature. Spaces competitor Clubhouse announced clips in September. Amazon has a clips feature that lets you share up to 30 seconds of some Prime Video content. And Slack even made a clips feature that lets you make short audio or video recordings to help people reduce time spent in meetings.

Update March 18th, 12:52PM ET: Added information from Twitter.