Elon Musk tried everything. He first dared Mark Zuckerberg to a one-on-one physical combat in a ‘cage match’; Zuckerberg called his bluff and accepted. He then threatened to sue Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, for violating Twitter’s intellectual property rights. That didn’t work too, and so Musk threw a four-letter word to insinuate that Zuckerberg was being cuckolded. He built on that by challenging Zuckerberg to a measuring contest of a particular body part. Zuckerberg, clearly, is not interested: he is busy launching the world’s newest social network. Meta’s latest offering Threads burst upon the world on July 6, ratcheting up an astonishing 100mn just five days later, leaving even the sensational ChatGPT in the dust.

It is an unfair comparison, though. ChatGPT is a completely new, fundamental technology and came from a small, almost start-up company. Threads, on the other hand, comes from the company that owns the world’s largest social networks. Irrespective, the Threads – Twitter battle promises to shape up to be the second Tech Battle of the Year, along with the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT versus Google’s Bard (Meta has an egg in that basket too, with the open-source LLaMA, and a ChatGPT competitor coming soon). This battle reminds me of 2011 when Google declared war on Facebook with Google+. To make it a success, Page and Brin threw everything including the kitchen sink at it – the global might of Google Search, access to its hundreds of millions of Gmail users, the ubiquity of YouTube. Google+ racked up an impressive 90mn users, but then fizzled out and was given a quiet burial by the company. Would Threads go the same way, despite its blazing start?

In a social network, the most important thing is the engagement and the presence of your friends and like-minded people whom you like to talk to and listen to. There is a secret sauce here which just humongous scale, market power, and billions of investments cannot brew. Zuckerberg is hoping that his secret sauce is Instagram. Threads is almost an extension of Instagram, and the 100mn users does not seem so impressive when you think that one in every twenty of Instagram’s over two billion subscribers had to just touch a button and become a Thread’s user. Here he is following the strategy that Bill Gates and Microsoft made their own, using the global ubiquity of Windows to extend and conquer software with Office, Internet Explorer, and now Microsoft Teams. His other bet is that Musk seems intent on running Twitter into the ground – while users still seem to love it, advertisers fled the network and are looking at alternatives. Another element of the secret sauce is perhaps the most interesting: Meta has declared that Threads will be a part of the ‘fediverse’, a social network which will across other participating networks, and thus create an ‘open’ network. To achieve this, Meta has introduced a protocol called ActivityPub which other servers and networks can adopt to become a part of the fediverse. Thus, when this happens, threads profiles could be followed by people on other servers and networks – think Mastodon, Koo, Bluesky – and content and information can be shared across different networks.

I have written about this earlier in this publication. There are two major factors that make social networks successful: network effects and switching costs. The former is where people use a network because that is where their friends are. Most of us have tried weaning off WhatsApp to go to Telegram or Signal, but inevitably we come back because our friends or networks are still on WhatsApp. Switching costs are the trouble of building your social graph and preferences all over again if you move networks. Moving from Twitter to a Mastodon or a Koo means you need to rebuild your friends circle there. The concept of interoperability that Meta proposes between networks has been wistfully talked about often – the idea of moving our social graph along with us when we move from one social network to another. When Web3 was still a thing, this was a hot idea: building decentralised games where you could take your virtual weapons and ranking with you when you moved to another game, or decentralised networks promising the same.

It is intriguing that Meta is latching on to this idea, though it might have incentives to continue creating the walled gardens it excels at. I sense that Zuckerberg and gang have learnt from the Google+ debacle – that just building another social network might not work, there needs to be a new way doing business. It could be an effective way to break Twitter’s monopoly, forcing it to go ‘open’ too; even Elon Musk has often talked about that. So, one day, we could share our content, friends and posts across both Threads and Twitter. But first, Zuckerberg needs to win that cage fight, and convince Musk!