Thursday 6 July 2023.
Possibly a momentous day for social media. Elon Musk’s new plaything Twitter lurches from sick into to intensive care. Mark Zuckerberg launches a rival platform Threads as part of his futuristic and gigantic global operation Meta Platforms Inc, (Meta for short). Meta sprang into life in 2021. It did do, according to its PR as a reaction to
‘the company's shifting long-term focus of building the Metaverse, a digital extension of the physical world by social media, virtual reality and augmented reality features’.
The rebranding was to integrate the sprawling and expanding Zuckerberg empire, earlier known by the name of its product, Facebook.
To add insult to marketing injury, even the name Threads is an aspect of Twitter which has recently found favour as a way of getting around the tweet character-limit by adding tweet after tweet producing a long thread. This even has its own emoji, a little cotton reel (ask your parents it this doesn’t make sense to you).
But I digress. I attempt to sign up to Threads, learning that 10 million or so others have already done so, in the first two hours after its launch.
An immediate snag. Those pioneers are already users of Meta’s Instagram platform. I am not an Instagram subscriber. I postpone my entry into this bit of Zuckerberg‘s Metaverse, and thus my admission to its new offering, Threads ...
