Facebook (err, sorry, Meta) is launching their Twitter competitor today in the US in the form of a new stand-alone app called Threads.
The Verge has a good summary on what is known: Instagram’s Threads: all the updates on the new Twitter competitor. I can also recommend the Hacker News thread; it has received quite a bit of attention and drew a lot of discussion.
As Twitter continues to flail about under Elon Musk, all eyes are on Instagram Threads as a potential replacement.
Twitter’s story with getting bought by Elon Musk is truly wild, and semi-seriously could be turned into a movie. Matt Levine wrote a lot about it in his excellent Money Stuff, and it was all great fun, truly peak 21st century amusement. Since the acquisition, Twitter has arguably received more attention than before, but also a lot more criticism, and is clearly struggling, dear lord, with even high-paying customers being ignored.
Elon Musk himself has stated multiple times that bankruptcy in the near future was possible. It remains to be seen whether these are the kind of temporary issues that can be expected from a fairly dramatic shift in leadership and strategy, or perhaps the beginning of the end of Twitter’s prevalence. Either way, this is excellent timing from Meta, and I expect they have a good chance of capitalizing on Twitter’s plight.
From what we know so far, Threads is “Instagram’s text-based conversation app” where “communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow.” The app is closely tied to Instagram, meaning you’ll get to use the same username across both apps, as well as quickly follow all of the accounts you’ve been following on Instagram.
Sounds a lot like Twitter, i.e. a more social version of micro-blogging. Reportedly it will even have two-way Mastodon integration, which is interesting and again a good move: Mastodon gained some popularity following Twitter’s, uh, adventures, and by embracing it, Threads can attempt to woo Twitter refugees more effectively than by not integrating… not to mention, it’s a greater blow to Twitter.
The Twitter alternative from Meta appears set to launch on July 6th, but the Irish Independent reports that Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has been in contact with the company about the new product and confirmed the launch won’t extend to the EU “at this point.”
GDPR strikes again! I will be curious to see what happens here; no doubt there’s an element of power play here on the part of Meta. GDPR and other privacy legislation in the EU are clearly anti-Meta; Meta is probably evaluating whether it makes sense to even bother with it.
An interesting perspective to take is that Threads appears to be very much like Facebook’s own Wall, where people can write posts, upload photos, and engage with people in the comments. Facebook’s own shift towards providing something more like a news feed has reduced the Wall’s relevance a lot, but the Threads can potentially be its reincarnation in a purer form.
Threads is cleverly branded under Instagram rather than Facebook or Meta to leverage its better reputation. Meta knows that as far as associations go, people (at least in much of the US and Europe) tend to like and trust Instagram, but tend to at least distrust Facebook or Meta. Many, many people still aren’t really aware that Instagram, and even WhatsApp are owned and operated by Meta now! They’d very much like to keep it this way.
Branding- and image-wise, Meta is in an interesting situation. On the one hand, both in the United States and much of Europe, Facebook is generally a disliked and mistrusted brand, following lots and lots of bad publicity from, well, being Facebook and doing Facebook things. On the other hand, they still have a metric ton of daily active users, passing 2 billion recently, so clearly they are, uh, successful. Sadly.