The Rise of Threads: Can Meta’s New App Challenge Twitter?

Threads is finally a reality. An app from the Instagram team that is designed to become the new Twitter. And it’s being launched at a perfect moment.

The timing is genius because it comes at a time when Twitter is facing a lot of challenges. Releasing this app just a year ago would likely have been engineering suicide. But today? Twitter’s product reputation (and its technical infrastructure) has been significantly damaged. Users are leaving the old social network for a variety of reasons, including its new owner, its uncontrolled hate speech, and its technical issues.

Twitter has been a company surrounded by drama from its inception. For those who want to learn more about its history, I highly recommend reading Nick Bilton’s book, ‘Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal’. The book covers the story up to 2010, and since then, equally dramatic events have unfolded, culminating in Elon Musk's infamous purchase of the company for $44 billion in the fall of 2022.

After Musk’s aggressive acquisition, Twitter went through a series of layoffs, availability and reliability issues, business model changes, and controversial product changes. These changes destroyed, for many, what was left of Twitter as the “global town square.”

When Mark Zuckerberg reportedly tried to buy Twitter in 2008 for $500 million in cash and stock, Facebook (now Meta) was in a very different position than it is today. After the challenges that Meta has faced developing the metaverse, the Menlo Park company is in need of a big win. The ‘buy them or crush them’ strategy has consistently worked well for them in recent years, and Zuckerberg’s team is hoping that Threads will be their next big success.

Threads is the latest example of this strategy in action. Meta is likely thankful for the timing, which allowed them to release an alternative to a seemingly doomed product. In just a few hours after its release, Threads has generated a lot of buzz, with hordes of people flocking to the new app.

It won’t be easy for Meta, though. Their privacy practices remain a challenge to overcome, and for Threads to become a true digital town square, it needs institutions, governments, and public officials to switch from Twitter. For now, Thread profiles can only be created by importing account data from Instagram, which could help control the bot problem that Twitter has historically had.

Threads must also refine its infrastructure to provide the right level of support to all these new users. As of late July 5th, I was still experiencing latency issues that made profile and thread pages load after several annoying seconds.

Once all of these issues are resolved, the trickiest question remains: Will your social circle migrate to Threads? How many of the contacts you follow are enough for you to finally switch? The thing is, people considering jumping ship have many choices beyond Threads.

Threads is the newest player, but there are other contenders. Mastodon quickly grew in popularity and now has over 1 million active users. BlueSky, an alternative driven by Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s co-founder and previous CEO), is in private beta and growing. Spill, an encrypted platform created by former Twitter employees, and Post, a platform oriented to monetizing shared content, are also in the game. None of Threads’ competitors can match Meta’s financial resources, making it the clear favorite.

We are in the early days of a new microblogging war. The winner will depend on who acquires enough funding to develop new technology, who generates buzz and organic growth the fastest, and who reaches editorial relevance and critical mass sooner.

And what do we do in the meantime? We should at least remember that our thoughts and ideas are the true currency, just like on any other social media platform. Where we spend that capital is entirely up to us. And I truly hope that Nick Bilton is working on a sequel to ‘Hatching Twitter’, covering the tumultuous decade that drove Mark Zuckerberg to launch Threads. I’d call it, ‘Cracking Twitter: A True Story of Money, Relevance, Ego, and Threads’.

Did you like this article? Subscribe to get new posts by email.