Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, July 31 (Xinhua) A series of chaos caused by Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter (now renamed X) in November last year made arch-rival Mark Zuckerberg smell the opportunity. A race against time to develop "X Killer" has begun.

Twitter's chaos gives Zuckerberg an opportunity to reveal flaws. Meta has long regarded Twitter as a competitor. Zuckerberg reportedly tried to buy Twitter for $500 million in 2008. But while Twitter captures cultural and political zeitgeist, its 237.8 million daily users and $5 billion in annual revenue are still not comparable to Zuckerberg's business empire and have never posed a serious threat to Zuckerberg.

"they didn't become the kind of company we thought they were." Instagram CEO Adam Moseri (Adam Mosseri) said.

But as soon as Musk took over Twitter, he launched what Moseri called "high-risk" decisions, such as limiting the number of posts available to non-members, which gave Meta executives an opportunity.

Musk's Twitter policy sparked controversy. Zuckerberg and other Meta executives wanted to attract Twitter creators to their social networks, so they handed the task to Moseri.

At the time of the secret planning, Moseri was on vacation in Italy with his family. He had to take a break from his vacation, answer a phone call from his boss, Zuckerberg, and then learn that he was going to compete directly with Musk.

It was already night in Italy when the phone was dialed, and Moseri spoke softly to avoid waking his sleeping wife. They discussed adding Twitter-like features to existing applications such as Instagram.

However, Zuckerberg came up with a different idea: "Why don't we take a bigger step?"

In the end, the conference call ended late at night in Italy. Moseri received an order to develop a stand-alone app to compete with Twitter, later known as Threads. It made him feel like a pain in his throat.

"Oh, my God, we have to find a way to solve this problem, because Zuckerberg is very excited about it," Moseri recalled. "sometimes you can tell when he is doing his best."

Zuckerberg's radical goal is to get the company's Twitter competition online by January, less than two months before he approves the plan.

Moseri, who led the work with longtime product director Connor Hayes, tried to lower Zuckerberg's expectations, saying they needed to build the right team first.

Moseri was in charge of developing Threads. Over the next few months, he assembled an efficient team of fewer than 60 engineers to develop a basic application on a very fast schedule, more like a start-up than a deep-rooted technology giant.

When forming a team, they give priority to those who are "aggressive and able to accomplish a lot of tasks quickly". He attracts employees from Messenger, Instagram and Facebook.

Earlier this month, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro accused Meta of poaching Twitter employees to help it quickly develop "copycat" apps. However, Meta spokesman Andy Stone responded that no one on the Threads engineering team was a former Twitter employee.

At first, Moseri recalls, the team, with only two product managers and one or two designers, and dozens of engineers, was a flatter, programmer-based team than most Meta product teams. The common practice for Facebook and Instagram is to demonstrate a design decision for 30 minutes before making a decision. However, this is not the case with the development of new apps, directly arranging tasks, such as "these are the six things we need to accomplish this week." By the time Threads was launched, the team had grown to three product managers, three designers and 50 programmers.

Simple miracles to speed up the development of applications, the Threads team avoided tricky decisions and gave up some difficult functions, including private messages, searching for content, or checking non-followers' updates. The company also chose not to launch new applications in the EU because EU regulators are preparing to implement new rules next year that require technology companies to provide regulators with more information about algorithms.

"you need to do simple things first," Moseri said. "I think it also helps to narrow it down, because what often happens in product development is getting bigger and bigger, and you want to add everything because they're great."

In fact, Threads is not the first product that Meta rushed to market in order to compete. In 2020, Instagram also launched a short video product, Instagram Reels, to compete with TikTok, according to Sam Saliba, a former global head of brand marketing. Meta's timing was ingenious, at a time when TikTok was facing a ban. At the time, former US President Donald Trump was trying to block or force the sale of TikTok, citing national security concerns.

"they think it's an opportunity to release the product quickly, bring it to market, and then build and iterate," says Mr Salibe. "when it was released, it was a very simple product with very thin functionality." However, Meta spokesman Seine Kim said it took the company more than a year to develop Reels.

Just seven months after Threads, Meta released Threads. In the eyes of current and former Meta employees, it is a miracle within Meta that such a small team has launched Threads in such a short time. Many believe that the rapid rise of Threads is also a reminder that for a company with about 66000 employees, a well-executed product launch may not require the bureaucracy they are used to.

"execute quickly and get rid of gaudy," someone wrote on the anonymous workplace app Blind. "this is the solid work that most of our personal contributors can do, but unfortunately we are tied down."

A flash in the pan? The rapid success of Threads even shocked its developers. In order to seize the opportunity offered by Musk's decision mistakes on Twitter, Threads launched a week early and attracted more than 100 million users in the first five days. By some estimates, it is the most successful social media app ever released.

Moseri said that because registered users exceeded the team's expectations, they began to predict how high the number of users would be. But their excitement diminished when the influx of users caused about a dozen serious technical glitches on the first day.

Still, today's aggressive product development schedule seems to be paying off. The next morning, Zuckerberg publicly touted Threads's early success, saying it "feels like the beginning of something special."

This is Meta's first homegrown hot product in years, and the last time the company launched such an in-house development product was Facebook. According to current and former employees, Meta is full of jubilation and may be said to be relieved. The average employee sent a large number of analyses on Blind about the initial success of the application.

However, the long-term success of Threads is not guaranteed. In the weeks after its July 5 release, analyst estimates that the app's usage has fallen by more than half from its early peak. For a long time, Meta has been imitating other companies' products or functions. However, with the exception of a few products such as Instagram Stories, its own "copycat" products have failed to catch on.

The sharp decline in the number of Threads daily active users turns out to be easy to get users to log on to Threads, but it's hard to get them to stay on it. Mastodon, Bluesky and other social apps that seek to replace Twitter are a case in point.

By the end of last week, third-party analytics services began to report a sharp decline in Threads participation. According to Similarweb's estimates, the number of daily active users on Google's Android platform fell from 49 million on July 7 to 12.6 million on July 23.

With Threads's daily active users plummeting, the development team behind it faces a new test: turning a simple Twitter replica into a thriving social network with its own identity and endurance.

Although Moseri did not confirm the figures, he said it was normal for people to experience a "user surge" when a hot social experience was launched. "I think when we are at the peak of our users, the situation is not as amazing as people say it is. So now [the number of users has plummeted], the situation is not as bad as people say, we are stabilizing." That's how he explained it.

The unexpected popularity of Threads prompted Moseri to shorten another holiday in Italy last week to handle a large number of requests and concerns from other Meta teams, such as communications and policies. He says he wants to keep the core Threads team independent so they can focus on adding features that users expect from a full-featured social app.

When asked about the key to Threads's long-term success, Moseri did not give the kind of overall vision he is well-known at Meta. Instead, he points to four short-term priorities: helping users build lists of people they follow, improving algorithms for determining what users see, allowing users to see only posts from people they follow, and figuring out how to get people to send messages to each other.

"many basic problems like this really need to be solved, and they need to be solved as soon as possible." He said. Five days later, Threads launched a number of new features, including a stream of posts that only show users the posts they follow.

At the same time, the excitement about Threads within Meta confirmed a piece of advice Moseri received. In 2018, he succeeded Instagram co-founder Kevin Strom as CEO. Soon after, Strom gave him a piece of advice: usually, the best way to boost morale is to launch functional products. This is true even for a company hit by mistakes and layoffs.

"you're so focused on taking care of everyone," Strom told Moseri at the time. "as long as you make sure you come out with a good product, everything will be easier later, I promise."

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