Threads, Meta’s long-awaited competitor to Twitter, is now available in the US and UK.
It was the middle of the night in the UK when Meta Threads, a new social network app I had pre-ordered from the App Store, was loaded on my phone.
I didn’t think there would be much going on in the UK at that time. I already had an Instagram account, so making a profile only took three clicks. I chose to follow everyone I already follow on the photo-sharing app.
I felt like I had just walked into a big house party all of a sudden. A lot of people were signing up, making their first posts, replying to others, and making comments about the new place.
In the first five minutes, I had dozens of fans, and as I write this, I have almost 500. (I still have less than 300 followers on BlueSky, a text-based network that Jack Dorsey started and where I’ve been for weeks.)
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Threads looks just like Twitter, so you’ll know right away what it is. Everything is the same, from the heart-shaped icon that lets you “like” a post to the circle of arrows that lets you repeat it.
Some early concerns were that there wasn’t a way to send private messages, that there weren’t any hashtags or trends to help find popular content, and that there weren’t any other ways to edit the timeline besides being able to mute accounts or words and block others.
But I think we should add the word “yet” because Threads has only been around for a few hours (even though it’s the second time it’s been around since its first version in 2019 was shut down). Maybe the world wasn’t yet ready (or mad enough about what was happening on Twitter).
What makes it different from other Twitter-like apps is that it works right away with this huge Instagram group. Two billion people use the app for sharing photos, and this gives them all an easy way to move to another site.
This makes it instantly interesting, which will be a big draw for advertisers, who will probably pay for it in the end, even though there won’t be any ads for the first year.
James Clayton is a technology reporter for North America.
Threads at first glance: can Meta do this? Isn’t this a form of theft?
The app looks very much like Twitter. The number of characters, sharing, and feed. All of it seems very familiar.
Mark Zuckerberg stated that in the first some hours, millions of people signed-up. When a tech-boss tells you how many people have signed up for a website, you should always be sceptical. But it-seems like-a-lot of people are on it already.
Part of the reason is that it works with Instagram. Meta isn’t making a brand-new app. It gets a big boost from its two billion Instagram fans, who give it a huge boost.
Bluesky and Mastodon, on the other hand, did not have this option. At first, there were no people.
But Mr. Zuckerberg doesn’t care if this is “fair” or not. He has already done this successfully with other apps (Reels is a copy of TikTok), and he is happy to do it again.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also used popular names on Instagram and got some of them, like Shakira and Gordon Ramsay, on Threads. He knows how powerful celebrities can be.
The talk about the app will make Mr. Zuckerberg happy. When it comes to social media, the network impact is everything. The app gets better as more people use it.
The network effect can lead to a sort of tipping point in social media. When so many of your friends or people you want to hear from are on a site, you feel like you have to join.
On a social-media site, it is very, very tough to make a network-effect happen. But it works really well when it-does. This is also true in reverse. Communities can leave a social media site quickly, which can be devastating. Myspace or Bebo come to mind.
But let’s talk about some problems with Threads.
Twitter has 2 feeds: recommendations feed & an option to only see tweets from people you follow. Threads, on the other hand, only has one feed that shows tweets from people you follow along with other material it thinks you will like. That might start to bother you.
It does not work well on your computer, & it does not seem to have desktop functions yet. That’s too bad.
There does not seem to be any trending information, so it is tough to tell what going spread is.
When it comes to proof, users can still pay a monthly fee to get their blue ticks, just like they can on Twitter.
Mark Zuckerberg called the app a “early version,” and that’s how it feels. It’s good at what it does. But this-app isn’t very-exciting right now.
So far, Meta’s boss will be thrilled with how things are going. Due to the bad press he’s gotten over the years, he’s trying to reinvent himself as the adult in the room, the reasonable tech billionaire who wants a friendly social media platform.
You can tell that Elon Musk is rude about this. He tweeted jokingly on Monday, “Thank goodness they’re so well-run!”
But if Mr. Zuckerberg (Owner of Meta) was worried that unhappy Twitter users would turn down Meta’s offer, it seems so far that he had nothing to worry about.
And if that’s the case, Mr. Musk could have a big-problem on his hands with an-app that works fine, if not great.
