Mark Zuckerberg and the success of Threads: “Twitter had its chance, but it didn’t make it”
[ad_1]
“None of the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee, it’s not something you do,” he wrote, obviously on Threads, Andy StoneCommunications Director of Meta, in response to accusations of plagiarism coming from Elon Musk. The point is, “Twitter is seriously concerned that Meta has engaged in systematic, intentional and illegal appropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” the statement reads. email sent by the lawyers of the social network to Zuckerberg, published by The Semafor website. Where it underlines how “dozens of former Twitter employees have been hired by Meta in the last year”: they would have been assigned “deliberately the task of working to complete Threads in a few months”, which the email defines bluntly a “copy” of Twitter.
In Menlo Park they don’t seem concerned: the app, launched 3 days ago, is at the top of the Apple and Android store charts, posts already exceed 100 million, subscriber comments are generally good. For Zuckerberg a positive moment, after years of media disasters. And the accusation of having copied someone else’s idea is certainly not new: in most cases, Meta’s experiments have failed, but if Facebook and Instagram are like this today it is also because they captured the Reels from TikTok videos and the Stories from Snapchat. Zuckerberg has usually copied apps and functions that were becoming popular, this time instead he bets on a social network that is less and less loved by those who use it, due to the convoluted rules introduced by Musk and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of Twitter for just a month: ” We are often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be cloned,” he tweeted a few days ago, and it seems hard to miss a reference to the Threads issue.
The challenge with Musk
“Italy has invited Zuckerberg to fight at the Colosseum”, but the government denies it
by Emanuele Capone
It could just as reasonably be argued that the new social network is inspired by Instagram (plus links), or even Facebook, where the 500-character limit per post doesn’t help because most of them are shorter. The real resemblance to the Twitter of yesteryear is in the graphical interface, in the reassuring simplicity, in the fact that the functions are few and easy to use. They will arrive soon hashtagsprivate messages, the possibility to modify already posted threads. And the software libraries, the interaction with the automation platforms, the sales tools, advertising. “They still have a lot of work to do to make the platform more productive – commented Carolina Milanesi, Creative Strategies analyst – but their big advantage is that they already have the infrastructure to support growth and development”. The path is clear, as explained by Zuckerberg himself: “Our approach will be the same as for all other products, first make it work well, then see if we can get it to a billion people and only then think about monetization”.
Threads is today available in 100 countriesranks fifth among applications most downloaded in Chinawhere even officially Meta is banned, but it is not found in the app stores of the European Union. The first reason is that the data of European users would be transferred to servers outside the EU, a practice that has just cost Meta a 1.2 billion euro fine from Brussels. The second is the risk of creating a monopoly with 3 social networks and the two most popular messaging platforms in the world (WhatsApp and Messenger) in the hands of the same company. So what is now a point in favor of Threads, namely the extreme ease of signing up (just have an Instagram account, you don’t even need to put your name), it could become an obstacle to its growth, at least in the EU. The solution shouldn’t be that far away, if Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram development, explained that it will soon be possible to cancel the Threads account without having to forced to give up even to that of the other social network, as is the case now.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg celebrates 70 million users and looks to the future: “It will take some time, but I think it should exist a public conversation app with over a billion people. Twitter had the opportunity to do this, but it was unsuccessful. We hope to succeed.”
Meta’s anti-Twitter
Musk threatens legal action against Threads: we tried it and we tell you how it is
by Bruno Ruffilli
[ad_2]
Source link
