With people still working from home, both people and companies are starting to look for new ways to stay in contact, connect, and talk to people. Fortunately, there are dozens of apps and websites that allow this, but how do you pick the best one? You may have heard of Discord, Telegram, and Clubhouse, but what are they? How long have they been around, and when is a good time to use them? We’ll answer all of this below.
Option One – Clubhouse
Chances are, you’ve at least heard of Clubhouse. However, it’s very unlikely that you’ve gotten an invite to join this platform. This is an audio-based app. The goal of this app is to let people from all over the world tell stories, talk, meet people, deepen friendships, and develop ideas. There are open rooms, social rooms, and closed rooms, based on the privacy level you want.
The app allows you to go in and out of chats based on different subjects. You can think of Clubhouse as a free-flowing, live podcast. You can toss in your two cents or choose to simply listen. You’re not allowed to transcribe, reproduce, record, or share any conversations without explicit permission, though. This is the one big rule the app has.
Clubhouse is massively popular with celebrities. Ashton Kutcher, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Oprah, and Drake currently use it. They join and host chats. It focuses on having an elite clientele, so much so that it became a status symbol in Silicon Valley. It’s courting influencers, and it only had 600,000 users at last count.
Founder: Paul Davison and Rohan Seth
Founded Date: March 2020
When to Consider Using Clubhouse
Since Clubhouse is extremely restrictive as of now, you’d have to wait until you get an invitation to join. However, people who have it say that it is excellent for networking since celebrities, influencers, and high-powered people frequent it. There’s also a Creator First option to help content creators generate money from the content they produce.
Option Two – Telegram
Telegram is freeware that is a cloud-based instant messaging software. You can also perform end-to-end video calling that is encrypted on it, file sharing, VoIP, and a host of other features. There are five data centers strewn across the world to help decrease the data load for this option. The operational center for this app has a base in Dubai. You can choose from a few desktop and mobile platforms, along with apps for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, and macOS.
With Telegram, you can also choose to have end-to-end secret chats that are encrypted. Any users are able to send voice and text messages, make video and voice calls, send animated stickers, and share an unlimited amount of documents at two gigabits per file, images, user locations, audio files, and contacts.
There are over 500 million active monthly users, and it was the most downloaded app around the world in January of this year.
Founder: Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov
Founded Date: August 2013
When to Consider Using Telegram
Telegram is great for working on group projects, connecting teammates, and collaborating with remote workers on projects. Since you get unlimited storage, it’s a nice way to track progress on large-scale projects and store your source files.
Option Three – Discord
The final option on the list is Discord. This is a VoIP, digital distribution, and instant messaging platform. The original design for Discord was to create communities. It allows any user to communicate with coworkers, friends, or family using video calls, voice calls, text messaging, files, and media using private chats. You’re also able to create servers, and these are larger communities.
Discord will run on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux, iPadOS, and web browsers without any issue. There are over 100 million active monthly users for this app, and there are 28 languages to choose from when you chat. The main goal is to manage and create public and private communities.
You get a host of tools focused around communication, including video and voice calls, integrated with gamer-focused services, persistent chat rooms, and the ability to create personal groups and send direct messages. Although Discord originally had gamers as a target market, this expanded to the general population and companies.
Founder: Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy
Founded Date: May 2015
When to Consider Using Discord
Discord works well for companies that have remote workers. You can easily collaborate, share files, and send personal messages to each team member. Also, Discord allows you to set up communities for each project or team you have.
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