Meta unspools Threads

Unlike Facebook’s products today, it’s anticipating that Meta’s users, developers, and creators will be able to pick up and leave -- or “rage quit” -- more easily, and take all of their assets with them, if Meta shifts from attract to extract.

Threads looks like Twitter, but is in fact a very different product: Threads is solidly planted in the upper right. When you log onto the app for the first time, your feed is populated by the algorithm; there is some context given by whom you follow on Instagram, but Meta seems aware that accounts you might want to look at may be different than acc... See more

Challengers like Meta’s Threads don’t seem like drop-in replacements for Twitter — especially since Threads head Adam Mosseri keeps saying his team will not “encourage” news on the platform. That makes Threads a comparatively tamer experience than the chaos that drove Twitter to its height. “Threads is to Twitter as methadone is to heroin,” says Kl... See more

Mosseri made clear that the retreat Instagram announced today is not permanent. Threats to the company’s dominance continue to mount: TikTok is the most downloaded app in the world, the most popular website, and the most watched video company. Meanwhile, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature has blown a $10 billion hole in Meta’s core advertisi... See more

Zuckerberg understands that in web3 fragmentation is inevitable, as users come to own and manage their data and metadata management—even if, in the world of Meta, they’re not quite able to monetize it. After all, people still need to manage their own data not only to cart it contiguously from one platform to another but in order to experience a met... See more

Every year, centralized social networks place more restrictions on what users and developers can do. They seem to believe that limiting choices is the path to a healthy network, while the opposite is probably true. A decentralized social network can challenge this hypothesis by making two powerful promises that centralized networks cannot. They can... See more

Meta (formerly Facebook) CTO Andrew Bosworth warned employees that creating safe virtual reality experiences was a vital part of its business plan — but also potentially impossible at a large scale.