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How Meta's Threads was born: Instagram head recalls conversation with Mark Zuckerberg
Adam Mosseri also revealed that Threads will soon get a direct messaging (DM) feature.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta Platforms-owned Instagram, has revealed for the first time how Threads, the company's new Twitter-like social media service that was launched on July 5, came about.
A late-night conversation between Mosseri and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg while the former was vacationing in Italy with his wife, led to the birth of Threads, he told The Washington Post.
‘What if we went bigger?’
According to Mosseri, the tech giant's initial idea was to incorporate several Twitter-like features into Instagram itself, as Zuckerberg and other executives contemplated on ways to attract Twitter creators to Meta's photo and video-sharing platform.
“What if we went bigger?” he, however, quoted Zuckerberg as saying.
‘He is very excited about this…’
Recalling his night-time conversation with the CEO, the 40-year-old noted how the former encouraged him to ‘go bigger.’ The call, he said, left him with a ‘sense of urgency’ and a ‘mandate’ to build an entirely new app to take on the Elon Musk-owned microblogging site.
“Oh God, we've got to figure this out because he (Zuckerberg) is very excited about this. Sometimes, you can tell when he kind of gets his teeth into something,” Mosseri recalled his immediate thoughts.
The team is assembled
The Instagram boss constituted an engineer-heavy team, comprising of around 60 members, and gave it just ‘months’ to come up with an all-new application. Finally, Threads was born, and became the fastest app to register more than 100 million sign-ups, reaching the landmark within just five days of its debut.
Since then, however, it has already lost more than 50% of its users, a fact Zuckerberg himself acknowledged.
New DMs feature coming
In the same interview, meanwhile, Mosseri also announced that Threads will soon get a direct messaging (DM) feature.
“Lots of basics like that really need to get fixed – and fixed quickly,” he remarked, acknowledging the drawbacks with the ‘Twitter-killer.’
Threads has already received two earlier sets of updates.
