What sort of 'place' will Threads be?

Will Threads kill Twitter??

Two huge things it has going for it are Elon Musk (and what does it say about his ownership of Twitter that this is the case?) and of course that Threads can link to people's existing Instagram accounts and networks which is undoubtedly a very big positive as it removes a potentially fairly chunky barrier to people using yet another social media platform.?

But this alone won’t kill Twitter. Because Twitter and Threads will still be different “places”.?

I was chatting to Matt Ballantine ?last week and he said something very interesting about how we should think of social media as “places” rather than as systems, networks or features.?

For example London & Liverpool have a lot of systems and features in common. Both have buildings, buses, trains, offices, football & music. But they are very different places in intangible but very powerful ways. There’s a vibe, an invisible thread that you can just feel. And as it is with physical places, so it is with social media platforms.?

A couple of years back Twitter introduced Fleets - a feature that looked very much like Instagram Stories. But it was just a feature, it didn’t make Twitter a “place” like Instagram and it was quietly dropped a few months later (this is probably a conversation for another time but I always felt that Fleets was off strategy for Twitter. We’d had a lot of success making the distinction that Twitter was different to other social media platforms because it was less “look at me” and much more “look at this” but Fleets was a very “look at me” feature).?

And so it follows that ultimately what will decide if Threads kills Twitter is not what kind of features it has but what kind of “place” it is.

If it can replicate the best of “Small Twitter” while avoiding some of the pitfalls of “Big Twitter” it has every chance. Especially if it can capture people during those “I love Twitter at times like this” moments (you know the ones - Eurovision, The Coronation, the latest government meltdown..)

But if it’s just Twitter features with none of the vibe or Instagram without pictures then I suspect some of the headlines will prove to be a bit over the top.?

Either way I suspect we probably won’t really know for a while as places tend to take a while to bed in. Maybe we’ll bump into each other over there while we work it all out.