For those of a certain age in the UK, “Threads” probably conjures up an image of nuclear destruction (For US people think “The Day After”), it’s not a bad analogy for what may happen to Twitter, now a big player has a clone.

I’ve written in the past about Mastodon (here), lots of people joined but it never stuck if we’re honest, other than as a fringe product. But the entry of Meta with the hard job of building up initial “followers” already done through Instagram, gives it a leg up into the mainstream.

I’ve not seen any law firm marketing teams jumping on yet, but given the number of organisations already on the platform I’m sure many are underway in creating their accounts.

Early impressions are it’s very much a very polished v1. But I thought I’d post few of my first thoughts on what’s missing or what I don’t understand yet and then keep this post updated as it develops.

Timeline – I don’t get this yet. It seems to be algorithm based and is giving me a load of posts from either popular accounts or accounts it thinks I may like from Instagram. This is OK for day one or two but after this it will get annoying, I want to see those I’m following in chronological order, OK the latter isn’t really Meta’s way but at least let me have majority the former.

Follows – this feels a little clunky at the moment, I seem to have to dual approve Instagram accounts. Now this may be just that as people join they’re setting up as private and so my initial “join to Instagram” needs to be approved by them for Threads, so a thread follow only would work in the same way as Twitter?

Lists – But thing missing if the platform wants the power users, I wat to group people by subject.

Web app – I primarily used Twitter through Tweetdeck, these platforms need to have multiple interfaces, not just one app. This isn’t Instagram. Marketing teams will definitely want to use HootSuite, Tweetdeck or one of the other power platforms but normal users need at least a basic web app asap.

API and third parties – they may not be perfect but typically Meta have been fairly good at opening up their products for use by 3rd parties. Sure in the past they have shut some functions down in both Instagram and Facebook, but generally they are fairly open. This is what grew Twitter in the early days and what we’re seeing with Reddit and Twitter now shows a closed shop is a bad idea.

Meta has talked about using the open messaging platform so that a link to Mastodon can happen, this also is the direction of Bluesky (the new product from the original Twitter team) which could really open up a fantastic platform for the future. And it’s really this that led me to the title of this post, this really could be the start of the end for Twitter in the same way Facebook was the end of Myspace, kind of ironic really!

Update 12th July: so after a week I’ve drifted off the platform, the lack of timeline for those I follow only creates too much noise from things I’m not interested and removes ability to start a “thread”. This though seems to be priority for next upgrade so let’s see. Also lack of hashtags makes things a bit clunky, in the early days things like #FF (follow friday) was a great way of following people interested in similar things. I will be back but only once v1.1 lands!