Mark Zuckerberg has used Meta’s power to get Threads off to a quick start, but this may only work to a certain extent.
A large technology corporation with billions of subscribers launches a new social network. The company intends to achieve success with the new social platform by leveraging the notoriety and scope of its existing products. In doing so, it intends to eliminate a prominent competitor’s application.
If this sounds like Instagram’s new Threads app and its offensive against Twitter, you are mistaken. In 2011, Google had just released a social network called Google+ that was intended to be a “Facebook killer.” Google pushed the new site in front of many of its users who relied on its search and other products, increasing the number of Google+ users to more than 90 million within the first year.
In 2018, however, Google+ was relegated to the dustbin of history. Despite Google’s massive user base, its social network failed to gain traction as people continued to migrate to Facebook, Instagram, and other social applications.
Throughout Silicon Valley’s history, large technology companies have grown by leveraging their size as an inherent advantage. However, as Google+ demonstrates, size alone is no guarantee of success in the volatile and fad-driven social media market.
This is the challenge that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, confronts as he attempts to displace Twitter and establish Threads as the leading app for real-time, public conversations. According to the technological past, size and scope are firm footholds, but they can only take you so far.
What follows is much more difficult. Mr. Zuckerberg requires people to be able to discover acquaintances and influencers on Threads in the same serendipitous and occasionally bizarre ways as Twitter. He must ensure that Threads is devoid of spam and scammers. He needs people to be patient regarding upcoming app updates.
In essence, he requires that users find Threads compelling enough to return.
“If you launch a gimmick app or something that isn’t fully featured yet, it could be counterproductive and you could see a lot of people leave,” said Eric Seufert, an independent mobile analyst who monitors Meta’s apps closely.
Threads appears to be an overnight triumph at the present. Mr. Zuckerberg announced that 10 million individuals had signed up for Threads within hours of the app’s launch last Wednesday. On Monday, there were 100 million individuals. According to the analytics firm Similarweb, it was the first app to do so, surpassing the chatbot ChatGPT, which acquired 100 million users within two months of its release.
Mr. Seufert, a mobile analyst, characterised Threads’s user statistics as “objectively impressive and unprecedented.”
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, appeared perturbed by Threads’ popularity. Threads’ 100 million users are rapidly approaching some of Twitter’s final public user totals. Twitter disclosed 237.8 million daily users in July 2022, four months prior to Mr. Musk’s acquisition and privatisation of the company.
Mr. Musk has moved forward. Last week on the same day that Threads was introduced, Twitter threatened to sue Meta over the new app. Mr. Musk referred to Mr. Zuckerberg as a “cuck” on Twitter on Sunday. With a ruler emoji, he then challenged Mr. Zuckerberg to a contest to measure a specific bodily feature and compare whose was larger. Mr. Zuckerberg has remained silent.
What Mr. Musk lacks on Twitter, Mr. Zuckerberg possesses in abundance on Meta: massive audiences. More than three billion users visit Mr. Zuckerberg’s constellation of applications, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, on a regular basis.
Mr. Zuckerberg has extensive experience encouraging millions of users of these apps to switch to another app. In 2014, he removed Facebook’s private messaging service from within the social network’s app and required users to download Messenger in order to continue using the service.
Threads is now closely associated with Instagram. Users must have an Instagram account in order to join up. People can import their entire following list from Instagram to Threads with a single screen swipe, sparing them the trouble of finding new users to follow.
Mr. Zuckerberg suggested on Monday that he could do more to promote the expansion of Threads. He wrote in a Threads post that he had not “activated many app promotions” yet.
Some users have questioned why Threads seems to have launched without some fundamental Instagram features, such as a search function that enables users to browse trending hashtags.
Anil Dash, a tech industry veteran and writer, stated, “There are a number of features that Threads did not launch with, possibly on purpose, to keep it brand safe” and minimise controversy from the start. What effect does this have on the long-term appeal of the network?
Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, stated in a Monday Threads post that a continuous inventory of new features to add to the new app has been compiled based on user requests. “They say,’make it work, make it great, and make it grow,'” he wrote, adding, “I promise that we will make this thing great.”
However, adding a new app to an organization’s existing products can ultimately lose momentum.
After Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and then-CEO, cloned Facebook with Google+ in 2011, users quickly lost interest in the new social network and ceased using it. Some viewed Google+ as something they were compelled to use while attempting to access their Gmail.
Former Google employees referred to the product as “fear-based,” as it was created solely in response to Facebook and without a clear vision for why people should use it over a competing network. One former Google employee wrote in a post-mortem analysis of what went awry that Google+ primarily defined itself by “what it wasn’t — namely Facebook.”
Obviously, Mr. Zuckerberg could replicate Bill Gates’ success with Threads. Mr. Gates, one of the founders of Microsoft, built his empire on Windows, the operating system that fueled a generation of personal computers, and then used that scale to effectively destroy competitors.
Once Windows dominated PCs, Mr. Gates was renowned for bundling other complimentary products with the software. When he did so in 1995 by bundling the web browser Internet Explorer with Windows, Internet Explorer quickly became the default browser on millions of computers, surpassing Netscape in just four years.
Nevertheless, Mr. Gates was eventually impacted by the strategy. In 1998, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for unjustly using Windows’ market dominance to eliminate competition. In the year 2000, a federal magistrate ruled against Mr. Gates’s company, citing Microsoft’s “oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune.”
Microsoft eventually reached an agreement with the government and consented to make concessions.
