Twitter hanging by the Threads
Just like that, the Internet forgot about ChatGPT (for a moment, at least) when a new soap opera aired this week. The entity known as Meta or Facebook or Mr. Zuckerberg launched a new social network called Threads. This is a direct assault on Twitter, the social network owned by Mr.Musk. Or is it?
In just the first few days of its launch, Threads’ makers claim to have onboarded over 70 million users.
Threads is portrayed as the Twitter killer app. It is also the text-based extension of Instagram, another popular application by Meta.
Should Mr. Musk really be concerned about Threads and the future of Twitter? He should be and he is. Twitter's lawyers have already sent a strongly-worded letter to Meta accusing it of hiring former employees of Twitter and through them, stealing its secrets.
But Threads is just a symptom of the trouble at Twitter and Meta is taking full advantage of it.
Twitter, the company which was rarely profitable, forced the sale of itself on Mr. Musk, who for some unknown reason thought that he could turn the company into a super-app modeled on apps like WeChat.
Twitter doesn't even make the top 10 social networks, whether you count the number of registered users or monthly active users. To add more bad news to this, Twitter is losing registered users. And that was well before Threads launched. Twitter is not helped by its owner who is restricting access to the platform by limiting the number of posts you can read per day or completely blocking anonymous access to any news feed there. Negative publicity about bad, unregulated content is not conducive for new users to sign up or for the current users to stick around.
That said, Threads is not the app which will kill Twitter. Twitter was dying well before Mr. Musk bought it. Do you remember that the biggest innovation at the time was the Edit button? That’s a feature that the company wanted to charge $4.99 for!
Since Mr. Musk took over Twitter in October, 2022, the company has been in firefighting mode. Advertisers leaving in droves, cash flow problems resulting in mass layoffs with little indication of any groundbreaking features to be released.
Meta, flush with billions of dollars was able to build this add-on to Instagram in 6 months and launched in 100 countries. For Meta, it is a test to see if, in today's world where images and short videos (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) are dominating, the short text posts are still in demand. When you have billions of users on your platform already, Threads might add a few millions to keep the investors happy.
With the launch of Threads, Meta - it appears - is running another test. Part of the future deployment of Threads will be the inclusion in Fediverse (the combination of the word federation and universe) through the inclusion of the ActivityPub social networking communication protocol.
The concept here is to provide users to freely move from one social network to another and communicate with users in other networks as well. If this suddenly triggers a déjà vu somewhere in the back of your mind, it might be associated with the word Metaverse. That was the obsession of Mr. Zuckerberg, where he changed the company name and spent untold amounts of billions by building avatars without legs.
Launching Threads is not to kill Twitter. Twitter is on its painful, expensive slide to irrelevance. Threads is a test to see if Meta can start creating this new universe of social networks where users can freely move around, communicate with each other and, of course, eventually be monetized. Everything else is noise, distraction and entertainment. Innovate or die, that's the recurrent pattern here.