Look Out Twitter, Threads Is Here
If you were a Twitter user and stopped using it either because of the reduced functionality, or the owner, or the changes to your feed, it looks like there may now be a major alternative and it’s called Threads. Yes, there are numerous Twitter knockoffs out there already, but what makes Threads attractive is not only the look and feel, but the fact that it comes from Facebook parent Meta, which gives it a chance to blow by Twitter in terms of active users in no time, meaning more of your friends on the platform.
Threads is loosely connected to your Instagram account in that they’ll share a user name and profile. The fact that IG already has 1 billion daily users compared to Twitter’s 250 million (probably not all of those active) means that there are a lot of people who might like the short form message format but have never experienced or don’t want to be on Twitter.
As you can see from the above image, it’s look is very much like Twitter, and it has many of the same posting characteristics as well. According to Social Media Today, which received an advanced inside look, “Threads posts can be up to 500 characters long, and can include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.”
It also has a main feed, and you can like, re-post, and reply to each update, but as of now there is no provision for hashtags, which was the secret sauce of Twitter for a long time. Not only that, you can’t DM, no view counts, and no way to craft your own news feed.
What makes every social network go however, is its algorithm that determines what posts to send you. Since the app is only just getting up and running, we don’t know how effective that is but expect it to be a work in progress for a while. In the meantime, it will just send you whatever it thinks you should see.
As of now, Threads is a mobile-only app with no desktop access. It is a serious threat to Twitter however (maybe the first real one) as Meta has the engineering talent to get this right.
And people are eager, or at least interested in it, as more than 30 million sign up for it on the first day!. You can access the app here, and follow me at BobbyOwsinski.
