Shipping Threads in 5 months
infoq.com
infoq.com
> One technique we use to tune the experience quickly was to make iteration in the product itself very easy. We did this using server driven UI. In a traditional client-server model, the client is responsible for everything about how the data is laid out on-screen. The server is just middleware pulling data out from stores. What we did was for the core interfaces which showed a list of posts, we instead sent down a full view model, which told the client exactly how to render it.
> This meant that when we were experimenting on the call to action and the reply bar, or when and how we show different reply face files, we could do that with just a code change on the server, which only takes a couple of hours to roll out and takes effect on all platforms.
> This let us iterate on the core Threading UI very quickly in the early days.
Very few companies other than Meta have experience in a scaling a platform to this extent.
And especially one that has the capabilities that scale along with it e.g. recommendation, trust & safety moderation etc.
In a time when users wanted to flee Twitter desperately, they could have launched a clone and likely won. Instead, they "kept it simple". They lacked even the most basic features, to the point where you signed up for Threads and found nothing at all which turned users away.
This is a talk about how to launch a successful app!? That seems totally disconnected from reality. No one should be learning any positive lessons from this.
This talk is from a technical perspective - and whatever your thoughts on Threads are, it is a great technical feat to launch something of that scale in 5 months!
Can't think of any company that comes close to Meta in the speed of shipping features and products, and Threads app is the best example
On today's internet it's no longer possible. The full population is here and it's overall too passive and docile. The biggest sites won't be disrupted anymore. Twitter is certainly deprecated. But just like our uncles and grandparents will keep Facebook alive for 20 more years, so it will be with Twitter. Threads was never going to be able to change that.
On the play store it's #2 in the charts ahead of ChatGPT, behind Temu.
Perhaps you need to rethink your definition of success and failure. It's objectively a successful platform launch.
There's plenty of metrics to support the fact that Threads is a successful launch.
Which is about half of X which has seen declining growth and revenue since Musk took over.
So by every definition it has been very successful given how long it's been around.
> Another bright spot is Threads, which is about to hit 200 million monthly actives.
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2024/q2...
(I'm assuming this transcript is accurate but have made no effort to verify.)
Via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(social_network)
So it reads as 200 monthly active users. Rather than 200M (million) monthly active users.
Except for the part where Meta used the immense network effects of Facebook and Instagram to repeatedly advertise Threads to their audience and harass them into trying it out.
This is more like slowing the 100->0 transition.
[1] The comment you're repling to.
[1] https://theconversation.com/from-twitter-to-x-one-year-on-ar...
It got me thinking that, in terms of building software 0 to 1, maybe the scalability of head count is surprisingly low.
Why not a day?