It is not the first time that Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) has taken advantage of the successful strategies of other social networks by copying their content: in 2016 Instagram launched ‘Stories’ or stories to compete with Snapchat and in 2020 Instagram announced Reels, a short-form video feature struggling with TikTok.
Will Threads be able to end Twitter?
Dubbed by the US media as ‘Twitter killer’, Threads shoots at the network of the little bird created in 2006 from its very name, since that word in English means threads and is part of its own vocabulary, as well as sounding like ‘threats’ ( threats). “Does anyone think this can get bigger than Twitter?” MMA fighter Mike Davis asked on Threads, to which Meta president Mark Zuckerberg replied: “Hopefully we’ll make it. “.
“It will take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with more than a billion people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t succeeded,” added the Facebook founder. Unlike other Twitter competitors, Meta has a good user base. According to its 2022 data, Instagram has 2,000 million monthly active users in the world and Facebook with 2,960. Instagram, along with TikTok, is one of the favorite social networks among young people.
It is also no coincidence that the tech giant has launched its new social network now, since since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter at the end of 2022 this social network, which is used above all by politicians and journalists, has experienced numerous technical problems, suppressed the previous verification method, it has lost much of its template and has come under fire for the type of divisive content it promotes.
“Twitter is still the best place for real-time updates, but its cracks have been showing for some time beyond the Musk purchase, and this could be the right time for Meta to jump in,” said Daniel Newman, chief executive officer. from Futurum Group, a research firm and advisory firm, to The Wall Street Journal. However, experts point out that switching from one network to another will not happen overnight, it will take time.
Differences and similarities between Threads and Twitter?
At first glance, Threads looks like a copy of Twitter where there are posts -photos, videos of up to 5 minutes and post texts of up to 500 characters- and you can interact with them in three ways: distinguishing them by “liking”, reposting them and commenting. Even Zuckerberg acknowledged how similar the two applications are by tweeting – for the first time in a decade and within minutes of opening his new network – a meme of a spider-man pointing at another spider-man, an image used on the Internet to point out that something it is a copy of something else.
Just like on Twitter, you can enable notifications to be alerted when a user posts, but you can’t create lists with users. Neither hashtag or tags can be used, so there are no trending topics or trends.
One of the advantages of Threads is that there will be no limit to the number of posts users can see in Threads, one of the key differentiators between the two apps after Musk last weekend announced (and then withdrew) limits on reading tweets to avoid “extreme levels of data extraction and manipulation of the system.”
The biggest differentiator for Threads, so far, is that the new app will eventually be interoperable with other services that also use the ActivityPub social networking protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress. Meta said this means that posts from Threads users who have public profiles will be visible to users of other apps that use ActivityPub. However, Meta did not say when Threads will connect to ActivityPub.
your algorithm
The app uses part of the Instagram infrastructure and forces people to use the same Instagram username, this allows Threads to have access to all the content that Facebook and Instagram already have collected about the user. The main page of Threads – like Instagram – is a combination of the content that has been published by accounts that the user follows and suggestions generated by an algorithm. But there’s no way to make Threads show only posts from accounts the user follows or to chronologically sort that content.
The app is still ad-free, as the company has said it is now prioritizing users. This new network only works on smartphones and will be available in more than 100 countries, but none in the EU. The Irish Data Protection Commission recently hit Meta with a record $1.3 billion fine for violating its privacy rules.
