Elon Musk’s X has already declared it aims to compete with LinkedIn for job listings and PayPal for payments. Now, it wants to take on the likes of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams with a video conferencing tool.
One of X’s employees, Chris Park, posted last week that the company had its first internal conference through the tool. Park claimed that initial feedback from the team was strong, and the company will likely work on features like the ability to pin speakers and better notification to indicate people joining or leaving.
X owner Elon Musk responded to the post with a fire emoji, which is the closest thing to official confirmation now that X no longer responds to press inquiries under Musk’s leadership.
An app researcher, who goes by P4mui on the platform, showed that users will be able to create new meetings directly from the iOS app, either instantly or scheduled for later, similar to other online conferencing tools.
Another app researcher, Nima Owji, pointed out that the conference feature may allow hosts to set a unique code for each meeting that participants have to enter while joining.
Like many feature teases on the Musk-owned platforms, the conference function does not have a clear release date or rollout plan yet.
Notably, X already allows live video streaming through its Spaces product. Tools like Zoom and Google Meet allow users to switch between video conferencing and seminar-style streaming. So it won’t be surprising if X merges both products.
It’s also worth keeping a close watch on how the platform goes about launching the feature. Earlier this year, when X launched the calling feature, the social network turned it on for everyone by default. Plus, there were privacy issues, such as no default IP address masking protection.
Before X makes the conference feature available for all users, it needs to take a close look at privacy and security controls.
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