“Let’s do this” tweeted, er, threaded, Mark Zuckerberg, marking the inauguration of Meta’s new social media platform Threads.
Zuckerberg’s company Meta, still better known to some as Facebook, rolled out Threads just as Elon Musk’s Twitter reached a new low after the restless billionaire set limits on daily tweets – posted and seen.
Whether or not Threads is a so-called Twitter killer remains to be seen. Tens of millions of signups within 24 hours are certainly nothing to be dismissed, but we should note that in the initial rollout most, if not all signups, are occurring through Instagram, another of Meta’s social media platforms.
For now, at least, Threads appears to be bound to Instagram. Signups require an Instagram account and at sign-up users have the option to send follow requests to all their existing followers at the picture-based app. Brilliant move from a marketing perspective. Hundreds of millions of existing users contacted by the millions who signed up for Threads in the first days and hours after its rollout.
By the numbers alone Threads is an astounding success. The first million sign-ups occurred within an hour or two. Within seven hours, according to Zuckerberg, 10 million were signed on. Before 24 hours had passed the total stood at 30 million. Within a week, and just before this column went to press, a hundred million sign-ups looked to be within reach. Who’d have thought that ChatGPT would be knocked off its perch so soon as the fastest-ever internet application to reach 100 million downloads?
Naturally, I too took a look at, and a test drive of, Threads within hours of its release. I had done the same with Mastodon and Bluesky at other points in the Musk era at Twitter. While my experience at those other two was underwhelming, it was strangely compelling to use Threads. Perhaps it was all the buzz from so many users present at start-up. Bluesky, for instance, is still in an invitation-only phase and has a staid, quiet feel to it at present.
I hadn’t used my Instagram account in about a year, and the testing phase for me at Threads isn’t likely to bring me back. After five days of Threading though, it feels like I’m here to stay. There are numerous quirks that have me annoyed but I am impressed with the sophistication already in place. A 500-character post limit, high-quality image and video functionality, and five-minute video clip lengths are among the items in the feature set at rollout.
On the negative side, no hashtags, no direct messaging, and for me at least on my Android phone, an inability to reply easily to certain threads that contain an image. In fact, I can’t reply with the default keyboard as it overlays the response area. Only by switching to a floating keyboard can I get to the response area. That is a major nuisance for now, but at least there are workarounds.
Well-known educator, author, and social media aficionado Larry Ferlazzo listed his top three requests for Threads: a way to only see threads from people he follows, a web interface, and the ability to create specific lists of people he follows. As an afterthought, he wants the ability to edit threads, something long requested in the Twittersphere.
I’m with Ferlazzo on the lack of a desktop or web-based version of Threads. I prefer to work on a big screen, but then Threads is really just a portal to Instagram. Will Meta split Threads fully from Instagram down the road? It doesn’t seem likely at this point.
For now, Threads is in a rapid-growth phase. Mr. Twitter Owner Musk is none too happy to see fellow billionaire Zuckerberg eating into the declining value of the Tweet company. In fact, he’s had his corporate lawyer fire off a cease-and-desist letter and threatened a suit over perceived unlawful misappropriation, theft if you prefer, of intellectual property.
Do you think Threads may be just another MySpace? Catholic News Agency, which has an Instagram presence of around 435,000 followers, already has 16,000 of those on its Threads account, a growth rate of around three thousand a day in just the first week.
Zuckerberg’s lofty outlook for Threads came in one of his initial posts: “The vision for Threads is to create an open and friendly public space for conversation. We hope to take what Instagram does best and create a new experience around text, ideas, and discussing what’s on your mind.”
Engineer Wolfgang Rupprecht raises these points about the initial meteoric surge in adoption. “There is a lesson here. It is much easier to start a new social medium if you already have one (Instagram) and the users can convert from one to the other with just one click. So what are the differences between Facebook and Threads? Why are they bothering to start another social medium that is very roughly the same sort of thing? They (Meta) clearly think that there is an untapped market for a social medium that is done slightly differently.”
Let’s check back in a year or so and see how the Twitter-Threads matchup has played out.
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