Surprise! Meta decided to release Threads a day early. I signed up about 15 minutes after they released the app, and I was the 115,456th person to join.
Since I’ve been on the app for about two hours now, this isn’t going to be an in-depth review, but here are a few thoughts after spending some time with it.
- Threads is an easy app to install, and you can choose to follow all of your Instagram followers on Threads, which gives you a built-in feed of people you already know. One of the biggest knocks on all the Twitter competitors is that it is hard to find your friends. Meta has at least partially solved this issue.
- There is only one feed. Right now it is a mix of people you know, verified accounts and some random other people. But I saw the feed changing as more of my followers from IG and other apps joined up. Now it’s mostly people I follow with some others mixed in. My guess is that it will take a while or the algorithm to sort itself out (Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri confirmed in a reply to a Thread that there will soon be a following-only feed).
- Design is simple, and that’s a good thing. The feed is a bit of a firehouse at the moment, but the design is simple and sleek. Exactly what you want in a real time app.
- Scale is proving to be a massive advantage. As I mentioned above, I was user 115,456 at the 15 minute mark. The one thing that all the Twitter competitors have struggled with is adding new users. Meta has no such problem, plus the infrastructure to handle hundreds of thousands of users all at once.
- Finally, if I were Elon Musk, I would be very, very worried (especially after this weekends Twitter meltdown). This is the first competitor that can compete with Twitter on resources and audience share. If the feed works out into something resembling a chronological feed, I think Mark Zuckerberg has a winner on his hands.