Spaces are now open to anyone with 600 Twitter followers or more

Twitter has opened up its Clubhouse-like Spaces feature to more people, it announced in a blog post. Now, anyone with 600 or more followers can get in on the action for the first time.

The feature, which allows users to create rooms that others can join and have voice chats, requires that people use the official Twitter app rather than a third-party offering. Spaces have been in testing since December, but this is the first time it's been available to almost anyone.

Since we've been building this, the ability to create a Space has become available to millions of people, and we've continued to make improvements based on your feedback. Today, we're bringing the ability to host a Space to all accounts with 600 or more followers on Twitter. Based on what we've learned so far, these accounts are likely to have a good experience hosting live conversations because of their existing audience. Before bringing the ability to create a Space to everyone, we're focused on learning more, making it easier to discover Spaces, and helping people enjoy them with a great audience.

Spaces work in a very similar way to Clubhouse rooms, with users able to control who can and cannot speak as required. There are some key differences, however, including the ability to react with emojis and read pinned tweets.

On Twitter for iOS and Android, when someone you follow starts or speaks in a Space, it'll appear at the top of your timeline as a purple bubble for as long as it's live. When you join a Space as a listener, you can react to what you hear with emojis, check out any pinned Tweets, follow along with captions, Tweet or DM the Space, or request to speak.

You can read more about how Spaces work on the Twitter blog. Anyone planning to make the best use of Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces should probably make sure they have the best headphones for the job as well.