Instagram Threads Launches: A True Twitter Competitor [Content Made Simple]
Instagram Threads Launches: A True Twitter Competitor [Content Made Simple]
#317: Q&A About Threads, Twitter's awful weekend, and more.
TOP OF THE WEEK
Meta's Twitter competitor for "friendly" conversation launches early
Quote:
Zuckerberg has an inconsistent track record when it comes to replicating the success of other platforms’ features, but Meta's copy-cat rollouts can capture deep engagement across a much larger universe of users.
Just look at Reels, for example, a feature modeled from TikTok and now a huge driver of time spent on Meta’s Instagram.
And in the early days of Instagram Stories, usage of the feature grew multiple times faster than Snapchat’s whole app — where it originated.
What to watch: Whether Musk and Zuckerberg will go through with their reported cage match — a reflection of the real, developing contest between the two billionaires.
Commentary:
Last night I launched a podcast where I just ramble about stuff, and mostly it was to talk about this. But I think Threads has a lot of potential, as much as it pains me to say that. And I’m interested to see how things progress from here.
FWIW the podcast may only ever have one episode. But it was fun to try.
THE TRIVIA QUESTION
The MLB Home Run Derby is coming up. What year did was it created?
Answer at the bottom.
HITTING THE LINKS
Link #1: Why Instagram is taking on Twitter with Threads (Q&A w/ Adam Mosseri of Instagram
This is a helpful Q&A to understand the biggest social media platform to launch in some time.
“Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space,” according to Mosseri. “And there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.”
Meta has been planning to release Threads, its self-described “sanely run” version of Twitter, for a while. The backlash to Musk’s recent limiting of how many tweets people can see per day was a catalyzing event for getting the app out the door this week, according to internal company documents I’ve seen. They also say that Meta expects “tens of millions” of people to try Threads within the first few days of availability.
Link #2: Twitter’s chaotic weekend ends with more questions than answers
Elon Musk truly has no idea what he’s doing. And it’s about to become a problem.
It was a chaotic weekend on Twitter.
It started with sudden changes as to who could view tweets, followed by sudden changes as to how many tweets users could view, and even times when many users couldn’t see tweets at all.
A new error message — “Rate limit exceeded” — confused many Twitter users who were seeing it for the first time. When Elon Musk announced the platform was temporarily limiting the number of tweets users could view, it created more questions than answers.
Link #3: Twitter is being sued by its ex-employees again
🤡
Twitter is being sued by its former employees again — this time for allegedly refusing to pay the expected cost of legal arbitration. As previously reported by Bloomberg, the suit was filed on July 3rd in the Northern District of California. It seeks to force Twitter to cover most of the costs in a slew of arbitration claims, which, of course, Twitter doesn’t want to do.
THE FUNNY PART
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Trivia answer: The MLB created the Home Run Derby in 1985.