CompuSchmooze February 2016: Clammr lets you tweet short audio clips

Lubetkin Media Companies LLC

Editor’s Note: The audio podcast is now available

How often do you want to share with friends what you just heard in an audio news story or podcast? Would you want to send them a short snippet of the audio and a link where they could hear more?

Now, you can do just that with a recently introduced app called Clammr (clammr.com). There is an iPhone app ready and you can sign up to be notified when the Android app launches.

The concept is the brainchild of Parviz Parvizi and his partner David Silverman.

“We created Clammr as a process of bridging audio into social media,” Parvizi said in an interview. “One of the things that we observed is that social media is now where people find things to consume, it is the primary driver of traffic to websites, but audio really isn’t present on social media.”

Listen to the podcast interview here.

One reason for that is that audio podcasts are usually 20 minutes in length, and are “hard to penetrate,” Parvizi says.

“If you actually shrink the unit size down, that makes it more appropriate for consumption and engagement on social media,” he says.

Parvizi and his Clammr co-founder David Silverman got the idea because both of them discovered they were auditory learners when they met in law school.

“We were in the same small group, and we figured out pretty quickly that we were among the slowest readers in the history of our law school,” Parvizi recalled. “We bonded very quickly over that.”

The pair began exchanging audio clips through shared folders, or text messages containing timestamps for particular audio excerpts.

It was Silverman, Parvizi says, who came up with the idea of being able to “tweet audio.”

You can record a Clammr from either the website or from the smartphone app. It can’t be longer than 24 seconds. When you share it via social media, the sound clip will have a link back to the original source, so if you send out a clip from a longer podcast, your followers can go back to the full program to listen.

You can look up podcasts in the Apple iTunes Store, and select portions of a program to convert into a Clammr. The Clammr app and website include a browser-based audio editor that can be manipulated with finger swipes on the phone to create the short clip.

“I think it’s very human to want to share with the community and get feedback from that community,” says Parvizi, noting that in the 200,000 years that modern humans have been around, only about five percent of that time has included the use of written text. “In a lot of ways, we’re wired to speak and listen and do goofy things visually.

The ability to record a Clammr live from a smartphone also offers an additional way for citizen journalists to deliver live reports from the scene of an event. It’s a bit of a challenge to hold your commentary under 24 seconds, but it can be done.

The app lets you listen to Clammrs from people you follow as an unending stream, and it’s actually an interesting way of catching up quickly. I listened to the NPR stream of Clammrs, and it almost seemed like it was just a shorter version of the Morning Edition Show that was just reporting the headlines.

I’ve used Clammr to create short teasers for news stories I’m reporting on the commercial real estate news website GlobeSt.com, and picked up about 30 listeners for each short audio program. You can hear my efforts at http://www.clammr.com/app/podcaststeve.

With a bit of perseverance, it could be a great way for podcasters, journalists, and other content creators to promote their products.

What kinds of audio would you share with your friends? Email [e-mail]. On Twitter, Clammr, or Periscope, follow @PodcastSteve.