Anyone interested in talking about the product decisions instead of Musk/Zuck hate?
- Interesting that they went with a stand-alone app instead of baking this into IG like they did with Stories (which killed Snap overnight). I wonder how much they’ll advertise the download inside of IG.
- Can’t say I like the name. Doesn’t evoke much emotion in me. The term “thread” is rarely used by normies without the word “Twitter” in front of it. And the choice of the plural form is interesting.
- The logo looks like it belongs to an app that should start with the letter ‘a’. Confusing that they go with a t-word like Twitter but then make the logo look like a different letter. Also, no color? Will it really stay black and white or will it adopt the IG gradient?
It’s a text-based app, which dramatically changes expectations. Instagram Stories was, like Instagram, photos and videos. That allows consistency in how things work (not that it does in practice because some gestures were based on shared expectations with Facebook Stories, others with TikTok or Snapchat, but… you get it).
Facebook designers have suffered quite a bit from dealing with very inconsistent media format: comments on one photo in an album are one of the obvious ones, or a poster criticizing and sharing a video and comments assuming the author shot the video is familiar to anyone with less media-savvy friends. Limiting media forms to consistent sets makes sense to have a smoother experience.
Facebook, and later Instagram once the first one was burned, has done a lot to have a social graph that makes sense: actual people and well-established pseudonyms, famous people and brands, etc. It’s the Social part of what is known internally as “The Graph” and a very crucial asset, something that was expected to be shared across properties: Facebook and Instagram, of course (hence the horrifying confusing relation between your Facebook account with your civil name and your pseudonymous account on Instagram, outing a few people that way), but also the MetaVerse lately and yet again with some controversy. WhatsApp fought against having the Social part of the graph as a default because WA had its own graph; that was a tough battle. It’s not fully isolated: WA Shopping leverages Inventory, the Things part of the graph, massively so.
Despite all that drama, this confirms that Facebook wants to leverage its Graph further, specifically Instagram’s—likely a victory from Ad Partners who want brands to feel comfortable early and spend fast.
The spaghetti logo looks nothing like what I have on my screen, so I think it’s a good one (Instagram gradient was to avoid having to deal with Facebook’s curse of starting very distinct, to be one of the too many blue apps far too soon). The name starting with 't' could be a way to capitalize on people who search by app name and their muscle memory that the app with ranty posts is called t-something.
I think the IG graph is more similar to the Twitter graph than the FB graph. Also, IG has much more of a “cool factor” which they’re hoping Threads will inherit.
I follow my grandparents on FB, and I don’t necessarily want that on my Threads.
Does Facebook have globally-unique user handles? Instagram seems to the the only Meta property where the handle is not PII (real name or phone number).
Among Meta properties, Instagram is also the closest to Twitter as an interest-based social network (rather than limited to people-you-already-know)
Any unique identifier assigned to an "identifiable" person is PII. It doesn't matter if it is an IRC or Instagram handler, or a twitter username. It is PII if it can be associated to a person.
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly.
Snapchat is overwhelmingly the primary way my much younger sister uses to talk to people of her age, discord is the second.
It was quite surprising, I was also surprised people of her age are exchanging discord handles IRL like we used to with MSN/ICQ etc. and then just use it for DMs. She doesn’t even use Snapchat stories because “no one watches stories” and are just direct DMing her friends, and posts general audience stuff to TikTok.
I immediately went and bought Snapchat shares when I found that out.
I actually think Threads is a great name. . . it sounds like discussion threads. Also, the name Twitter is beyond awful because it sounds twitty! :)
Seriously, I have no dog in this fight. I stopped using Twitter about a year ago when everything went full Elon. I might use Threads at some point, if it gains enough traction.
@ was used to reference people looooong before Twitter popularized it. In fact, it was users on Twitter already using the paradigm that made the engineers integrate it. Same as hashtags.
> I don't seem to remember that. Where was that used? The closest I can think is email, which is where I thought Twitter borrowed it.
IRC, chat rooms, web forums. Pretty much any sort of group social arena.
The symbol lends itself to the usage, not vice versa. That's like asking "why do people use quotation marks around quotes"; because that's its intention.
- Interesting that they went with a stand-alone app instead of baking this into IG like they did with Stories (which killed Snap overnight). I wonder how much they’ll advertise the download inside of IG.
- Can’t say I like the name. Doesn’t evoke much emotion in me. The term “thread” is rarely used by normies without the word “Twitter” in front of it. And the choice of the plural form is interesting.
- The logo looks like it belongs to an app that should start with the letter ‘a’. Confusing that they go with a t-word like Twitter but then make the logo look like a different letter. Also, no color? Will it really stay black and white or will it adopt the IG gradient?