Threads

Sometime Wednesday morning, Threads on the web started showing a little red dot over the notifications tab. The notification dot had been a big omission to the web experience, so I’m glad Meta added it in.

Adam Mosseri says he tested the feature out on Wednesday for a quote post. Quote posts are one of the biggest omissions from the Threads web experience, so I’m really hoping it launches soon.

Now we just need Threads to not default to the “For You” feed every time I open it up.

Meta’s Threads just got proper search, but Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post found that it doesn’t show results for some terms related to covid and vaccines as well as terms like “sex,” “nude,” and “gore.”

From the piece:

“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.” 

That said, as my colleague Wes Davis found, as you’re typing in terms like “covid” or “covid-19,” you might see a prompt pointing you to the CDC’s website. But if you hit enter to search for those terms directly, the results page will still be blank.

Update September 11th, 8:37PM ET: Added details about CDC prompt.

Apple’s Phil Schiller deleted his Twitter account a while ago and then quietly joined Threads when it launched. He’s now posted about the just-announced September event on Meta’s platform, which you are free to interpret any way you wish.

We just want to know if you’re clicking or you’re hate-clicking! That’s the only reason we’re asking for constant always-on access to your microphone and trying to scan your iris and follow you around the web! We promise!

I saw this post from Dare Obasanjo highlighting Meta’s on-Threads message about its commitment to the fediverse. You can see the message yourself by going to somebody’s profile and clicking the “threads.net” bubble.

Meta has already taken a small fediverse step, and I’m looking forward to seeing the eventual support for platforms like Mastodon. It can be the new thing we all beg for now that web Threads is live.

“This is an early v1,” Tom Bender, a PM on the Threads team, said in a post. “We’re painfully aware of the feature gaps and it’s going to improve quickly.”

A bunch of my colleagues at The Verge have just gotten access, so check threads.net to see if you can post from the web, too. I should warn you that the web app isn’t quite as robust as the mobile app — there’s no notification dot when you have notifications! — but it works well enough.

He replied to me this morning to say exactly that — well, using emoji.

He said on August 4th that the feature would be arriving in “the next few weeks.” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said this week that the web version will be ready “soon” but that it “needs more work.”

I could really use it.

Learned this thanks to a Chris Messina post on Threads. On my iPhone, when I have both Threads and the X / Twitter app installed, there’s an option to send a Threads post to X from the paper airplane icon. I guess that’s one way to try and get more people using Threads.

A blog post by analytics firm Similarweb says data from the Android Threads app show the social network has fallen to 10.3 million daily active Android users as of August 7th. That’s down from a July 7th peak of 49.3 million.

Earlier this month, both Gizmodo and CNN cited Similarweb data while reporting the Threads slump. Whether Threads could still go the distance remains to be seen, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is keeping a positive face for investors.

-Yaccarino said she has “autonomy” under Elon. “[He] focuses on new technology ... and I’m responsible for the rest.”

-She demurred on the Musk v Zuckerberg fight. “We’ll see if that cage match really does happen.”

-But she said Elon really is training for it. “I’ve had a front row seat of witnessing that.”

-As for Threads, she thinks Meta’s rival is skating to where the puck already is. “They may be building to what Twitter was ... and we’re focused on what X will be.”

It hit me that Twitter is dead, so the word “tweet” is fair game now! It wasn’t even Twitter’s word to begin with. So I have reversed her reversal, editing this just-published post of mine four times to just call them tweets. Zuck tweeted. Mosseri tweeted. I will be tweeting again too, just as soon as Zuck and Mosseri let me tweet from the web!

You’d think Threads would already have DMs support given both Facebook and Instagram have it. But nope, you have to head over to a person’s Instagram account and hope that you can DM each other there.

Speaking to Washington Post Adam Mosseri recognized this is one of just a few features Meta needs to bring to Threads to make the new service last.

Asked what he sees as the key to Threads’ long-term success, Mosseri didn’t offer the sort of big-picture vision he has become known for at Meta. Instead, he pointed to four short-term priorities: helping users build their lists of people to follow, improving the algorithms that decide what users see, giving users a way to see posts only from people they follow, and figuring out how to let people message each other.

No surprise, but Adam Mosseri tells Casey Newton web Threads is indeed en route.

We’ve been running a steadily growing list of alternatives for that formerly bird-associated social network, and now that TikTok has added a text-only option, it’s become part of our inventory of 15 social networks vying for your attention. If you’re wondering where to go next, these are some interesting choices.

“You asked, we answered,” Meta wrote in the notes for an iOS update released on Monday. “New features coming, so keep an eye out as you browse the latest version of the app.”

I don’t see any obvious differences in my updated version of the app. But Instagram boss Adam Mosseri teased a “following” feed in a video, so hopefully that’s coming soon. (Meta, I’m also begging you for a way to look at my feeds on the web.)

The WSJ says that daily active users declined 70 percent to 13 million from its peak (Sensor Tower) and average time users spent in apps decreased to four minutes from 19 minutes (SimilarWeb). Meanwhile, Twitter’s daily active users are unchanged at about 200 million and spend an average of 30 minutes a day on Musk’s not-really-free speech hobby (Sensor Tower).

Hey Zuck, how about that feed of just people we follow?

That’s “way ahead” of what the company expected, he said on Threads. As for what’s coming next, the company is working on “improving the basics and retention” this year, and then “we’ll focus on growing the community.”

Threads surpassed 100 million users just days after it launched this month.

That’s because of an increase in “spam attacks,” according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri. I’m guessing these limits won’t affect too many people, though — unlike Twitter’s rate limits.