The Origin Story of Threads... "Developed Immediately After Musk's Twitter Acquisition"

The origin story of Meta's social media (SNS) 'Threads' has been revealed. Shortly after Elon Musk acquired rival Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, seized the 'moment of opportunity' and made a bold decision to assemble an elite team of fewer than 60 people, creating the platform in a speed race within seven months.

According to foreign media on the 29th (local time), Meta rapidly developed and launched Threads last November under Zuckerberg's urgent directive to "take big risks," with a team of fewer than 60 people.

Twitter is an SNS with significant social and political influence, but it actually has 237.8 million daily users and annual revenue of about $5 billion. However, after Musk acquired Twitter in October last year, he started paid services. As he made a series of 'high-risk' decisions, such as limiting the number of posts users could make, the situation changed.

While it could have been a crisis, it was also a great opportunity to take over Twitter's territory. Zuckerberg had previously attempted to acquire Twitter in 2008 for $500 million.

The origin story of Threads began last November, shortly after Musk acquired Twitter, when Adam Mosseri, Instagram's CEO, received a late-night call from Zuckerberg while on vacation in Italy.

The two discussed adding Twitter-like features to existing Meta apps such as Instagram. Zuckerberg reportedly suggested, "What if we do it bigger?" Thus, the development of Threads began, and seven months later, Meta unveiled Threads.

Initially, Zuckerberg instructed the development of Threads and wanted to launch it by January of this year, less than two months later, according to internal sources. However, Mosseri calmed Zuckerberg down, saying that an appropriate team needed to be formed first.

Over the following months, Mosseri, along with Instagram's Vice President of Product, Connor Hayes, prioritized people who were willing to work hard and could handle multiple tasks simultaneously, assembling an engineer-focused team.

The team started with a few dozen engineers, two product managers, and one or two designers. According to Mosseri, the Threads team was more horizontal than other teams within Meta. It was a programmer-centered team.

To speed up development, Threads boldly omitted difficult features such as private messaging, content search, and hiding feeds from people not followed. Additionally, the app was not launched in the European Union (EU), where the Digital Markets Act prohibits combining personal data.

After this process, Threads was launched on the afternoon of the 5th. Within five days of launch, the number of users surpassed 100 million.

However, the long-term success of Threads remains to be seen. Daily active users sharply declined just two weeks after launch. Zuckerberg also mentioned on the 27th that after surpassing 100 million sign-ups, the number of users dropped to less than half.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.