Author Archives: mdoeff

First Impressions of Threads

I posted this the other day on Threads and figured I’d post it here too.

A few thoughts about Threads from a Product Management perspective after using it for a couple of days… First, it’s fascinating to see an MVP released at this scale. Features they left out of the MVP: Follow feed, reverse chronological feed, search, hashtags, lists. That’s a lot of basic features missing! But while there was a fair amount of grumbling about all of omissions – it didn’t slow the insane growth that we’ve seen in the first two days.

And here are things they made sure were included – block, mute, ability to block words / phrases. They also heavily focused on the cold start problem and made sure that when you started on Threads, you saw a lot of activity – even if that meant you were seeing accounts you don’t follow. The key thing here is they optimized for features that help people block offending / annoying content at the expense of basic features like search and hashtags. Tough choice but I think it was the right one.

And the last thing that’s impressed me is the range of communities that I’ve seen joining Threads. I’m seeing lots of major brands, journalists, sports communities, etc. joining at a level that I didn’t see on Mastodon, Post, etc. And this includes a LOT of people that I followed in the early days of Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. that I haven’t seen in years. Not sure if they’ll all stick around but it feels like the golden years of Twitter from 10-15 years ago.

Find me on Threads here.