So Meta went for the Mortal Kombat-like "Finish Him!!!" move towards Twitter yesterday by releasing their Twitter-inspired social platform called Threads.
What they got right:
Timing. Twitter is/was on its final legs.
Onboarding. Have an Instagram account? Step 1: Log in with your Instagram account. Step 2: Import all your existing followers and everyone you follow. Done.
Just the basics. Included just enough functionality and familiarity to make it easy to use.
Discovery. Yeah it seems noisy at first. There's no dedicated feed of whom you follow yet. But until then, both the people you follow start to flow into the main feed, and new interesting people start to populate.
No Ads. This won't last long, but it's the best approach to give users a rest from ads, keep the already noisy feed a bit cleaner, and a surefire way to create the scarcity needed to get big dollars later from advertisers.
As a budding writer, I missed Twitter after leaving when it became an unbearable dumpster fire under new leadership. In less than 24 hours of use and 30 million plus users later, Threads feels like a winning idea to me.
You can, if you'd like, follow me there: @gmadhere .
