Threads triumphs with super start / Is this the Twitter killer?

Horst Buchwald

Threads triumphs with super start / Is this the Twitter killer?

San Francisco, 7/8/2023

Last Wednesday, millions of people learned that parent company Meta had officially launched its Twitter-like app Threads. When Meta announced this three months earlier, the management expected worldwide and sustained press coverage. But it was silent. Nobody followed up. Every journalist only had ChatGPT on their mind.

So it was not surprising that the media took an unusually long time to understand the importance of this good start.

It started with a number. Meta announced on Thursday morning: 30 million users had registered. Among them was a strikingly large number of celebrities from politics, culture and business.

So META CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to explain what threads are. His answer contained two significant sentences:

„Threads‘ vision is to create an option and a friendly public space for conversation.“

„We hope to leverage what Instagram does best and create a new experience around text, ideas and discussion of what’s on your mind.“

Both sentences together tell the curious: You will not experience anything bad with us. There will be no surprises either. Everyone is friendly and open to any kind of conversation. Add to that a „new experience“ and it has to do with „what’s on your mind“

What is the message now? It reads: We are different from Twitter. We are bigger and have a lot more experience. Proof: Instagram. We love you.

Anyone who thinks threats can harm Twitter is referring to Instagram. With two billion users and the corresponding experience of how to lead differently polarized users „into a friendly public space“ (e.g. in the case of Facebook and Whatsapp), the number of users should increase rapidly. Yes, no doubt; Meta has timed it right, while Musk is unlikely to maintain its 250 million user base.

This is what these numbers indicate:

► The New York Times reported over the weekend that Threads is the fastest downloaded app of all time. She surpassed the ChatGPT record of 1 million downloads in five days.

► Internal company data indicates that Threads has now generated over 95 million posts plus 190 million likes.

Such a triumphant development does not leave someone like Elon Musk indifferent. But what is the best defense? Or should he attack better? Musk chose to:

Twitter is threatening Meta with a lawsuit alleging trade secret theft related to the Threads app. Twitter’s attorney Alex Spiro alleges that Meta hired „dozens“ of former Twitter employees, thereby unlawfully abusing Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property.

Meta has denied the claims, stating that no former Twitter employees are part of the Threads engineering team.

My conclusion:

Whether a lawsuit will help Twitter – I can not imagine. One can assume that in such cases there will be endless arguments. Precious time passes.

On the other hand, times are beginning to change. Without having conclusive numbers, my gut feeling tells me: the golden days of Twitter are over. The number of further Twitters announced alone is a warning sign.

– It would be more rewarding for Musk to

as announced, to create a competitor to ChatGPT that has no black holes, that knows that there are absolute limits and therefore does not make any decisions that are „better“ than those of humans,

– a voice-controlled operating system

– a chip implanted in any politician who uses the word war.