My review on "Threads" after 3 days of launch

The big news on this American Independence Day (more commonly known as Fourth of July) was the launch of Threads by Instagram. But the bigger news was that it amassed 30 million subscribers in just a few hours!

A few days later & they are well on track to cross 100 million & Elon Musk is threatening to sue Meta for building a Twitter clone.

I have always loved technology. I have bosekaushik as my username in GMail & Rediff, kaushik_bose in Yahoo!, was on Twitter since 2009, TikTok on Day 1 in India .. so how could I not take Threads for a spin!

(P.S.: I’ve always been obsessed with cars & now that I’m officially in the EV space with GreenTiger, I’m very much allowed to do so :P)

And here’s my take:-

• The 50 Mn sign-ups in a few hours is a novelty feeling. First, they made the login frictionless.. it simply clones your Instagram login and imports the identical network. So, getting to a 100 million isn’t that big a deal. I’d give much more credit to ChatGPT which achieved the feat in 2 months, because it was word-of-mouth by having to register.

• I can’t comprehend how this is possible… but THEY DON’T HAVE HASHTAGS! Trivia time: It was on Twitter that a former Google developer, Chris Messina proposed the concept of a hashtag! It was in 2007 & though Twitter weren’t too keen, they were one of the early adopters in 2009. Instagram (not Meta then) introduced it in 2010 & Facebook were inspired only in in 2013! But why do you need hashtags? Hashtags are used to indicate to fellow users AND the algorithm, that your content relates to a specific topic. So if this newsletter is meant for startups or marketing, it will show this article to people who follow / are interested in that topic. So, my Threads feed is filled with content I’m just not interested in.

• The algorithm seems to be quite nascent right now. Thankfully, Mark Zuckerberg himself also accepted it! For example, if I’m following only a couple of accounts, I’m getting other people’s posts on my feed.. but none from the 2 accounts I am following. I literally had to go and check out the specific account.

• Dependency on Instagram is too high. Since there are no hashtags, it all boils down to porting your existing followers. It’s great for people beginning their journey (like my wife’s brand new holistic wellness account), but not for people like me who don’t have a sizeable enough following.

• What this also means is that people - both creators and consumers - have the Instagram mindset. So, they'll prefer images over the written word. I doubt how many hardcore Instagram followers would "thread" their thoughts 10 times a day like in case of Twitter. There's a reason that you now have the option to connect your Twitter account with LinkedIn - usually both the platforms have the audience that prefer reading over "just" images. They are looking for a deeper level in conversations (speaking of the majority here)

• There is a particular feature I really liked though - you can stop seeing number of likes on your thread! So if you are like me.. and just want to write because that’s what you love to do.. you can do that. This is indeed very novel in these crazy influencer times! (Connect with me on Threads)
  

Now here’s something you may not have known. Meta had launched Threads as a companion app to Instagram in 2019 and it was shut down by December 2021! It was built as a “camera-first” mobile messenger app, which was ignored till a 2020 redesign. Even that garnered 13.1 mn global installs, but was rated 3.1 star. Now this would partly explain why Meta went on to buy WhatsApp for $19.1 bn!

My biggest concern is that it’s still the same Instagram crowd. I don’t see too many huge influencers moving from Twitter to Threads (which is what they are directly competing with), simply because they’ll need to start from scratch yet again! Yes, they may want to ALSO build on Threads, but Twitter’s not going anywhere in the near future.

The other takeaway which I think is very important for startups & I offer this advice repeatedly while mentoring some of them is: ”Launch when you are 70% ready. It’s better to be too early, rather than waiting to launch at a 100%, when you most definitely would be late!” If you haven’t still tried it, you must try it though.