When I saw today’s announcement about an update to Threads, I got very excited before immediately getting disappointed. Okay, not that disappointed, but I did, like probably everyone else, misread one of the released features for a major one we all want.
Today, Threads announced an update to its new social media app. It’s not surprising to see an update come out so soon since its launch — Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri already said publicly that the company plans to release updates on a weekly basis for the app. Today’s update, while not releasing anything that fundamentally changes the experience on the app, brings some nice quality-of-life improvements to the service.
Cameron Roth, a developer on the Threads team, announced that the update will be rolling out for Threads users throughout the rest of the day. In addition to bringing translation support to posts, the update adds a slew of other features like the ability to subscribe to unfollowed users, the ability to follow someone from the replies page, and improvements to loading and scrolling the activity feed.
The one feature that threw all of us off at first was the announcement of a “follows” tab. While we all immediately jumped to the hope that this was the promised chronological feed of only people you follow, that is not the case. This update adds a new “follows” tab on the activity feed to only show you activity on your content from people that you follow. While it’s not the big feature we want, it’s still a nice-to-have.
Of course, as with any release, today’s update also includes the usual round of bug fixes and performance improvements as well.
Post by @camrothView on Threads
Roth says that the update may take through the end of the day in order to roll out, so users should expect to see all of the new features by tomorrow. He also said that you may need to close and then reopen the app in order to notice the changes. Interestingly, the updates are all being pushed out on Thread’s server side so there won’t be an actual update to the iOS or Android app in order to get the new features.
Post by @camrothView on Threads
It’s good to see Threads focusing on weekly releases. Not only will it ensure that the company works through any post-launch bugs quickly, but it will also keep the app feeling fresh, even if the updates are relatively small. That’s something that the app needs, especially since it has already lost half of its peak daily active users since its launch earlier this month.
While Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri tout the successful launch of Threads, it has a long way to go to catch up to Twitter. The app currently sits at around 23 million daily active users compared to Twitter’s 109 million. That said, amassing almost a quarter of Twitter’s size when it comes to committed users in a few weeks is no small feat.
It’s going to take months to see if Threads has the steam to continue to grow and truly compete with Twitter but, with consistent updates and a solid foundation to grow off of — not to forget the network effect of Instagram — it has the best shot out of any other app I’ve seen yet.
