It’s been only a couple of days since Meta launched Threads, which is a new product from the team at Instagram. And success has come in heaps as more than 50 million people have already signed up for the platform. The figure also means... trouble for Twitter.
The success has been unprecedented to the point that Twitter lawyer (and also of Elon Musk) Alex Spiro has sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, arguing that Meta used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to build the new platform, besides claiming that Meta has hired “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees. Meta’s response was immediate and it has come in a post on Threads, with communications director Andy Stone saying: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” Twitter owner Elon Musk has weighed in with a tweet: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Figures are on Meta’s side
To offer perspective on Meta’s new success, we should to turn to a social network that was once very popular — Myspace at its peak had around 150 million global users and Rupert Murdoch felt that the network could be worth as much as $6 billion with a potential to have as many as 200 million user profiles by mid-2007.
In April 2022, Twitter reportedly had 229 million daily users, which is minuscule compared to that of Instagram and Facebook. Looking at figures from October last year, Instagram has two billion monthly active users worldwide, closing in on the 2.96 billion who use Facebook. Further, Threads is on track to cross 100 million users within two months, a feat achieved only by ChatGPT, according to the analytics firm Similarweb.
Is Threads like Twitter? Not exactly but it certainly has fewer rough edges than Twitter, besides a good marketing strategy. You can put out a text message within 500 characters, which is restricted to 280 on Twitter (unless you are signed to Twitter Blue), you can ‘heart’ a post, reply, rethread or share. To attach a photo or video to a Thread, tap ‘attach’ and select up to 10 items. Unlike Twitter, you can’t send a direct message at the moment.
But the factor that will fuel the growth of Threads is that it’s less aggressive and has fewer people doling out political views than Twitter where trolls are in plenty. Zuckerberg has pointed this out to a user: “The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands…. That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
Advantage Threads
There is an opportunity for Threads. Anybody who wants to sign up for the new platform needs to have an account on Instagram. So, it’s easy to understand why people are boarding Threads. Second, Meta has said that there are plans to make Threads interoperable with non-Meta social networks that support a decentralized protocol already used by WordPress and Mastodon. Called ActivityPub, once the new protocol is implemented, you’ll be able to see and interact with Threads content from other platforms and services that support the standard.
What does it mean for Twitter?
Dissatisfied voices continue to be heard when Twitter gets mentioned. User experience has become a problem and capping the number of tweets users can read has only added fuel to the fire. At the moment, Threads has zero advertising and it may become the most serious threat to take users away from Twitter. Meta has the infrastructure and knowledge about social media, plus, it has managed to stay relevant despite challenges by TikTok. It tackled the growth of Snapchat by introducing a clone to Instagram Stories, tackled TikTok by adding Reels and now has Threads to take on Twitter.
Picture: The Telegraph
