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.
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:
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
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.
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 🍿
Unless YouTube has a killer app, I cannot see the reasoning behind even testing games, much less launching them to the public. Netflix has a selection of great mobile games that anyone with a subscription can download for free, and yet hardly anyone does.
If Netflix is having a hard time with their mobile game adoption, I think the writing is on the wall for this one. YouTube is going to have a difficult time competing with basically the entire web and App Store’s gigantic selection of free games.
I wonder if YouTube will make certain titles available to Premium subscribers only. Perhaps the maximum saturation of premium subscribers has been met, and product is thinking up new features for YouTube Premium.
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.
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!
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.”
A few days ago I wrote about walkability, and how walking can improve your creative problem solving. It really got me thinking about city planning, the growing car problem, real estate troubles, the state of the US, and how transport options (and geography) dictate the success and growth of US cities.
But, that’s not the whole picture is it? There’s hundreds, if not thousands of variables that define a successful healthy town or city or state. Over the course of drafting this post I attempted comparing several cities and states and essentially just gave up. I have no idea what the standard candle is for a city, town or neighborhood.
Besides, what even is success for a city? What is a suffering town? Who decides these metrics anyway? Enter Strong Towns. From their Mission page:
The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient.
For the United States to be a prosperous country, it must have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. Enduring prosperity for our communities cannot be artificially created from the outside but must be built from within, incrementally over time.
Whoa. I can get behind that mission statement. This seems good. Qualifiable over quantifiable. Makes sense. No one enjoys comparing revenues to neighboring towns. That’s joyless. Delving deeper, they define their truths:
As advocates for a strong America, we know the following to be true:
Strong cities, towns and neighborhoods cannot happen without strong citizens (people who care).
Local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperouhttps://stephen.news.
Financial solvency is a prerequisite for long term prosperity.
Land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained. It must not be squandered.
A transportation system is a means of creating prosperity in a community, not an end unto itself.
Job creation and economic growth are the results of a healthy local economy, not substitutes for one.
Okay, from here, let’s summarize:
Strong cities require strong citizens. A supportive local government and long-term investments ensure prosperity, wealth and job security. Land is a finite resource and shouldn’t be wasted on selfish endeavors that don’t benefit the public. Transportation systems (public transit, roads, etc.) and prosperity are deeply intertwined.
Basically, the immutability of towns can be the kiss of death. So avoid that at all costs. They continue onward with rational thinking and a simple approach:
There are no universal answers to the complex problems America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods face. At Strong Towns, we seek to discover rational ways to respond to these challenges. A Strong Towns approach:
Relies on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects,
Emphasizes resiliency of result over efficiency of execution,
Is designed to adapt to feedback,
Is inspired by bottom-up action (chaotic but smart) and not top-down systems (orderly but dumb),
Seeks to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale, and
Is obsessive about accounting for its revenues, expenses, assets and long term liabilities (do the math).
So true. Of course there’s no universal answers. But I’m American, so I’m gonna need solutions like… yesterday. Well, that’s not gonna happen. So get that out of your system right now. In a nutshell the Strong Town approach could be summarized as follows:
Focus on the long-term, little-wins over large projects, account for everything, and give a shit about the people.
This is smart. Slow, but smart. You can’t run your city like a start-up (e.g. moving fast, breaking things). You have to be attentive, feedback-driven, work through the bottom-up, and worry more so about the long-term problems over the short-term issues.
They put together a handy strength test to help you get a pulse on your city. My hometown of Fort Worth, Texas scores about a 5 comfortably. However, it would have scored a 3 or a 2 in the year of my birth. I’d say my hometown is doing well nowadays. Not great, but it’s getting better. I can’t say the same for some of the other cities I’ve lived in.
Alas, what is past is prologue. So, if your city is struggling — I would say email or write letters to the city council, at the VERY least. Attending city council meetings, asking questions and getting involved is really the only way to make a difference. Voting in every election is equally important sure, but make sure you’re in contact with your elected officials.† Making your voice heard if priority number one for residents in any town.
It takes real elbow-grease to to turn the wheels of local government, and elected officials are deaf until the townspeople voice opinion. Remember, “Strong cities, towns and neighborhoods cannot happen without strong citizens (people who care).” From there, just follow Stong Towns principles and you’ll be on your way.
TL;DR
You want change in your town? You’ver city? You’ver state? There’s only one variable that matters. People who care. Make your voice heard, talk to the people who make decisions.†
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†It’s too bad there’s no online central registry or database of locally elected government officials for all 50 states (I was hoping to find something like the U.S. House of Representatives directory). However, you do have options. You can visit usa.gov and they setup a handy navigator to find your local officials. Alternatively, you should be able to find your locally elected officials contact information at your local library or via your preferred internet search engine.
