Strategy

Taylor Hatmaker at TechCrunch writes:

Threads passed 2 million signups in its first two hours live in the App Store and shows no signs of slowing down. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted the milestone on his Threads account.

At this rate, Twitter is dead in the water. Threads has serious staying power. There’s over 2.5B accounts on Instagram. The barrier to signing up for a Threads account is to simply open Instagram. Organic use of Instagram will naturally lead you to creating a profile. It’s that easy. This is where Zuckerberg thrives: growth strategy.

In 2019, Instagram and Facebook launched a standalone messaging app called Threads. It was originally designed to be a sort-of Snapchat group-messaging clone. This was all before Facebook’s big name change and pivot to Meta. Ergo, before Zuckerberg decided to invest in building out the Metaverse. Despite having millions in daily active users, Facebook decided to ultimately shut down Threads:

The app today is ranked No. 214 in the Photo & Video category on the U.S. App Store — an indication of its continued failure to catch on with a broader audience. It’s also rated a middling 3.1 stars across 2,500 reviews as users complain about its usability, layout, missing features and glitches. To date, Threads has seen approximately 13.7 million global installs from across the App Store and Google Play, according to estimates from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

This is what it looked like. Half-messenger app. Half-Snapchat clone:

Once Threads disappeared, it was presumed to never return. I figured it was destined for the Silicon Valley graveyard of failed startups/projects (RIP Google Reader). But then, something wild happened. In October of 2022, Elon Musk decided to buy Twitter. This was meaningful because, ever since Twitter has been under Musk’s ownership, he’s basically nosedived the company into oblivion. This has left Twitter extremely vulnerable to competing social networking apps. There have been many cycles of users leaving for these Twitter-clones.

Every decision he’s made has been a kiss of death: marketing, engineering, public relations, human resources, and so on. It’s been a nightmare for former employees, and a horror show contractors. To be blunt, Musk is devoid of compassion, and the first 90 days alone were not good for anyone. Ex-employees are currently in a arbitration lawsuit against Twitter and Musk and many having never received their severance. Lastly, the latest micro-managing efforts from Musk, have essentially broken Twitter.

Instagram’s Threads app has been under development for some time now. At least the public has known about it since early March. Internally, it was understood to be called Project 92. It has an unmistakable design language. It’s very Instagram-esque

From The Verge earlier this month:

One of Meta’s top executives showed employees a preview of the company’s upcoming Twitter competitor during a companywide meeting today that was watched by The Verge.

While Musk has been squandering cash and resources, Zuckerberg has been building. In what appears to be a stroke of serendipity, Meta & Instagram (aka the new Facebook) is launching the new Threads app this week amidst Twitter’s latest troubles.

Threads’ (re)debut is happening just as users flock from Twitter (again) to competitors. But this time, it feels different. It feels more permanent this time around. A lot of users are very done with Twitter. Thousands of people are leaving Twitter behind for Mastodon in part because of Musk’s questionable rate-limiting nonsense. Both Threads and Mastodon are powered by an open-source protocol called ActivityPub. Which essentially makes them interoperable social networks. This interoperability, is not universally celebrated on the fediverse. Personally, I believe this will be good and healthy for the web. But that remains to be proven. This could all go sideways next week. According to reports, your Instagram handle will be your Threads username: @example@threads.net.

This is a huge blow against Twitter. The headwinds are strong for Threads. Twitter has been on a losing streak, and chances are Musk will only make this worse. Instagram even put together a countdown on its site.

It also was briefly on the Google Play Store earlier this week on July 1. It’s gone now, but will presumably be back on the Play Store later this week. Apple’s App Store on the other hand has it listed as a pre-order right now:

What started as one kind of social network clone has become another kind of clone altogether! Who would have thunk. The drama, the suspense! It’s heating up, and I suspect this battle for the new “town square app” is just getting started. I’ll be sitting over here with the popcorn 🍿

Turns one of the side-effects of blocking traffic from reading tweets, is it will tank your SEO and search appearance. Twitter is forcing all unregistered traffic to login or register. If your content is not indexable, it will hurt your SEO scores. This mechanic is well understood by web and software engineers. My best guess is all the pandering and feet-kissing people in his orbit neglected to tell him the consequences of this to keep Elon’s temper tantrums at bay. Making tweets visible to registered users only and installing rate-limits is a terrible product choice that affects growth strategies negatively. Don’t take my word for it, the numbers speak for themselves.

Barry Schwartz for SEO Roundtable writes:

On Friday, June 30th at about 1pm ET, Twitter had 471 million URLs indexed in Google Search according to this site command.

Then yesterday, July 2nd, I snapped another screenshot and Google had 34% fewer URLs indexed, 309 million, that is 162 million fewer URLs indexed

Then this morning, I grabbed another screenshot, and it was down now to 227 million URLs indexed, that is about 52% less than what was indexed on Friday

[…]

Twitter URLs indexed by Friday to today went from about 471 million URLs to 227 million, a drop of about 52%. I wonder what type of impact this has on its traffic from Google Search, if any.

Musk is an idiot.

It’s been an exciting year for Microsoft. Microsoft continues to make bets on thrilling components of software development. This was a huge missed opportunity for giants like Apple, Google and even Adobe. This morning, Microsoft announced they have acquired Lobe.

If you don’t know what Lobe is, here’s a primer: Lobe, is basically software for building, training, and exporting custom deep learning models. The interface is very Quartz Composer-esque. I previously wrote about Lobe here.

To be honest, I’m a little shocked Apple didn’t acquire Lobe first. Considering the boundless software opportunities and Lobe’s earnest genesis in Quartz Composer, it’s strange Apple didn’t beat Microsoft to the punch. Maybe there were meetings between Apple and Lobe, who knows. What I do know, is that Microsoft knows that ML tools are going to be huge.

From Lobe’s announcement email:

As part of Microsoft, Lobe will be able to leverage world-class AI research, a global infrastructure, and decades of experience building developer tools. This will allow us to rapidly scale Lobe to its full potential, making it more intelligent and available to more people. 

We plan to continue building Lobe as a standalone service, supporting open source standards and multiple platforms. Together we are committed to making deep learning simple, understandable, and accessible to everyone. We deeply appreciate your support and look forward to sharing more with you soon! 

Sounds familiar huh?

I’m nervous Lobe will be assimilated into some obscure product, never to be heard from again. But, historically that hasn’t always been the case — LinkedIn and Github (at the time of writing this) are both still stand-alone services.

On the other hand, I’m really happy for the Lobe team. They have a remarkable product on their hands. And Microsoft has essentially given them AI research carte blanche. Lobe lacked that world-class research ability until now. It’s entirely possible that joining Microsoft might have been the only real way to scale their shared vision of “deep learning for everyone.”

So all-in-all, I’m into it. ✌️