제 19 호 The Battle of the Billionaires in Silicon Valley
Kicker: OPINION
The Battle of the Billionaires in Silicon Valley
By Jun-Seo Park, Reporter
Recently, Meta released Threads, a text based SNS. Threads received a lot of attention, with 30 million subscribers signing up within 16 hours of its release. Instagram officials introduce Threads as a new text-oriented space where you can freely share your thoughts, follow friends and creators you are interested in, and communicate with people all around the world with common interests.
How to Use Threads
It is easy to create Threads accounts because you can create a Threads account through your Instagram account without a separate signing up process. Threads supports up to 500 characters of text per post. In addition, photos and videos can be uploaded, up to 10 photos can be uploaded, and videos can be uploaded up to 5 minutes long. As an additional feature, once a post is uploaded, it cannot be modified. If you want to modify it, you must delete it and upload it again.
There is Twitter, Threads-like SNS. But the difference from Twitter is no hashtag function and no DM* function. Also, Twitter supports follower feeds and time series feeds, but Threads does not support that way. In other words, there is no function to show only the posts of the people I follow, and there is no function to show them in chronological order. Instead, Threads shows you posts that fit your interests through algorithms.
* DM: Direct Message
An additional feature is that Threads is not supported by the PC version and can only be written lightly on the mobile. In my opinion, when people write on the PC version, they tend to write somewhat seriously, so I think it was intended to make it light on mobile.
This orientation of Threads seems to be receiving some response. It shows that it is a simple SNS space where each person shares their opinions and thoughts. And in an era when directed photos or addictive short videos are overflowing, people who feel tired will likely be interested in Threads, which is an SNS that gives a light feeling. In addition, short-forms which means short videos, such as YouTube's ‘Shorts’ and Instagram's ‘Reels’, are gaining popularity, and I think Threads has satisfied the consumers’ desire which want a short-forms even in the text.
There is Twitter as a text-based short-forms, but in people's perception, Twitter is considered closed because there is a lot of political and provocative writing, while Threads pursues an open and friendly space.
Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg
As mentioned earlier, text based SNS previously have Twitter, which Elon Musk acquired in 2022. Later, on July 6, 2023, Meta released Threads, which is very interesting. This is because there was an incident in June 2023 in which Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg announced that they would engage in a physical duel through a mixed martial arts game after causing conflicts online. Due to the release of Threads, the argument between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is getting worse.
Why Did Elon Musk Acquire Twitter?
There are two main reasons why Elon Musk acquired Twitter. First, Twitter is more likely to be used for other purposes than to grow the function of Twitter's original business, social network services. Big data related to individual tendencies is needed to succeed in FSD** that Tesla is studying. If FSD is possible, you can watch movies and shop while driving. This is because big data related to individual tendencies and interests is needed to implement such services. There was no way Tesla could get this big data, but Twitter could be a great tool. Therefore, it can be assumed that the shell of SNS is needed rather than the original purpose of SNS.
** FSD: Full-Self-Driving. Driving a driverless car, which is the fifth stage of self-driving cars.
Another reason Elon Musk took over Twitter is that Elon Musk's final dream of Twitter is to provide social network services and financial services at the same time. It is to call, send messages, shop, and pay with one app. Elon Musk has already taken the path of a pioneer for the digital finance business through PayPal, but has failed. PayPal's predecessor was X.COM, and Elon Musk had already planned to make X.COM the world's largest financial institution in 2000. And he is now trying to achieve his dream through Twitter, which he failed to achieve 22 years ago. So, it can be assumed that he bought it as a ‘private company’ last year, knowing that it was impossible in the form of a general ‘stock company’.
In conclusion, it remains to be seen whether the newly released Threads will be able to win the competition with Twitter and dominate the SNS market. As the directions pursued by Twitter and Thread are slightly different, I hope that they will be able to move well in the direction they pursue.
Sources:
https://help.instagram.com/179980294969821/?helpref=related_articles
https://www.aitimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=152314
