Week 298 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2023-07-10.
They did it, Instagram launched their Twitter competitor. They've already clones Snapchat and TikTok features, so why not take on Twitter at its weakest point? From Twitter's perspective it really feels like it's insanely simple to make it all better. The verification program is a mess, ads almost universally seem like scams and there's plenty to be said for its stability and reliability at the moment. Elon Musk is not the steward we need, or even deserve.
Instagram's Threads app has impressive numbers for an app that just launched, with tens of millions of users enabling their Instagram handles on the service. But when you start with over a 1 billion active users across your other services it's not very surprising, is it?
Most surprising to me was that it seems to have coped with all of the demand. There was no waitlist, unlike Bluesky, and the onboarding took a few taps.
Algorithms, algorithms, algorithms
Like the rest of the social media landscape, I want chronological timelines. They work best for me, but right now Threads is using an algorithm to serve it's content. Sometimes it's pretty tame and contains more relevant posts from accounts I follow and other's it's just suggestion after suggestion as to which celebrity, brand or influencer I might want to follow.
I hate it, just show me the things I know I want to see. The 'For You' tab in Twitter is actually not as awful as I thought, and easy to get lost in, but I find more comfort in the 'Following' tab where I can just catch up on specific accounts and topics and then get on with my day.
The icon and the overall UI is really nice, and the overall experience is familiar. It has an Instagram feel when you get to your profile and deep into settings but it's otherwise unmistakably a Twitter clone.
Will I become a daily user? Not right now, my Twitter usage has changed a lot int he past few years and I follow more things that are relevant and matter to me than before. Football still seems to dominate my timeline but not in the way it did before which began to feel unhealthy.
I'll continue to give it a try and as ever, you can find me over on Threads at @cchana.
Update
Axios, probably correctly, call it Meta's Threads whereas I alluded to it as an Instagram Threads because that's the entry point. Applying Meta more correctly gives you an idea of the ideals at play here.
They also report that Threads hit 100 million accounts in less than a week. Impressive numbers but when they have 1.6 million active users that they can push the product to in an instant, is that really a surprise?
Tags: facebook, social media, threads