Meta launches its bid to compete with Twitter, Threads, in the United States, but what many people don’t remember is that the social network has already launched an app with this name that Meta closed due to lack of users: this is its story.
The technology sector has not talked about anything else in the last week: Meta has launched Threads, its alternative to Twitter that is available from July 6, although only for Instagram accounts in the United States and other Anglo-Saxon countries.
The new Instagram application, about which not much is known at the moment, aspires to be a torpedo to Twitter’s waterline and wants to take advantage of the company’s drift under the mandate of Elon Musk, who is making decisions that are not Many users are liking it.
One of them is to establish a limit on the number of tweets they can see per day, which in the case of unverified accounts becomes a maximum of 1,000 posts per day, while paid profiles or with a tick blue can read up to 10,000 tweets a day.
But what many people don’t know is that Threads does not start from scratch since Instagram already launched an application with the same name in 2019 and closed it less than 2 years later because it never reached the number of users desired by Meta.
Coinciding with the arrival of the Twitter clone made in Meta, below I will tell you what the predecessor of Threads was like and the story of its failure.
It was launched in 2019 but as an Instagram chat app
The first Threads was launched in 2019 but it worked very differently from the current Meta tool. It was a secondary Instagram app, also for Android and iOS mobiles, designed for direct chat messages between users of the social networkand it was not the first since it replaced another previous one called Direct.
Unlike Direct, Threads was more feature-rich and in addition to exchanging chat messages it also included camera features with which users could directly post updates to their Stories, much like its rival Snapchat.
Originally, its chat functions were quite limited, since you could only write to your closest contacts on the social network, but in the year 2020 it received a big update which enabled the option to chat with any Instagram user from Threads.
In 2021, Meta closed it due to lack of users
The first Threads did not get the results that Meta wanted and for 2 years barely exceeded 13 million installationswell below the data of an Instagram that exceeded 1,000 million users on those dates.
Users complained, not only because they had to download and use a different app just to chat with their Instagram contacts, but also because Threads navigation was not very intuitive and because for a long time its functionality was quite limited.
Faced with this situation, Meta made the decision to withdraw Threads at the end of 2021, closing its servers and removing the application from the Google and Apple mobile software stores.
Users were recommended use the messaging features of the main Instagram appwhich from then on has all the features of Threads.
The failure of the old Threads has nothing to do with the current platform that Instagram has launched to compete with Twitter, but it is symptomatic of the large number of services that Meta launches and how common it is for them to fail and meet the requirements. Ambitious company goals of Mark Zuckerberg.
Find out more about robert corrales, author of this article.
Known how we work in Computer today.