An enormous tech firm with billions of customers introduces a brand new social community. Leveraging the recognition and scale of its present merchandise, the corporate intends to make the brand new social platform successful. In doing so, it additionally plans to squash a number one competitor’s app.

If this feels like Instagram’s new Threads app and its push towards its rival Twitter, assume once more. The 12 months was 2011 and Google had simply rolled out a social community known as Google+, which was aimed as its “Facebook killer.” Google thrust the brand new website in entrance of a lot of its customers who relied on its search and different merchandise, increasing Google+ to greater than 90 million customers throughout the first 12 months.

But by 2018, Google+ was relegated to the ash heap of historical past. Despite the web search big’s monumental viewers, its social community did not catch on as folks continued flocking to Facebook — and later to Instagram and different social apps.

In the historical past of Silicon Valley, massive tech corporations have usually turn out to be even greater tech corporations through the use of their scale as a built-in benefit. But as Google+ exhibits, bigness alone is not any assure of profitable the fickle and faddish social media market.

This is the problem that Mark Zuckerberg, the chief govt of Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, now faces as he tries to dislodge Twitter and make Threads the prime app for real-time, public conversations. If tech historical past is any information, measurement and scale are stable footholds — however finally can solely go thus far.

What comes subsequent is far more durable. Mr. Zuckerberg wants folks to have the ability to discover pals and influencers on Threads within the serendipitous and generally bizarre ways in which Twitter managed to perform. He wants to ensure Threads isn’t crammed with spam and grifters. He wants folks to be affected person about app updates which are within the works.

In quick, he wants customers to search out Threads compelling sufficient to maintain coming again.

“If you launch a gimmick app or something that isn’t fully featured quite yet, it might be counterproductive and you could see a lot of people churn right back out the door,” mentioned Eric Seufert, an impartial cellular analyst who intently watches Meta’s apps.

For the second, Threads seems to be an in a single day success. Within hours of the app’s introduction final Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned 10 million folks had signed up for Threads. By Monday, that had soared to 100 million folks. It was the primary app to take action in that timeframe, exceeding the chatbot ChatGPT, which gained 100 million customers inside two months of its launch, in line with the analytics agency Similarweb.

Mr. Seufert, the cellular analyst, known as the numbers that Threads racked up “objectively impressive and unprecedented.”

Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, has appeared agitated by Threads’ momentum. With 100 million folks, Threads is rapidly surging towards a few of Twitter’s final public person numbers. Twitter disclosed it had 237.8 million every day customers in July 2022, 4 months earlier than Mr. Musk purchased the corporate and took it non-public.

Mr. Musk has taken motion. On the identical day final week that Threads was formally unveiled, Twitter threatened to sue Meta over the brand new app. On Sunday, Mr. Musk known as Mr. Zuckerberg a “cuck” on Twitter. Then he challenged Mr. Zuckerberg to a contest to measure a selected physique half and evaluate whose was bigger, alongside an emoji of a ruler. Mr. Zuckerberg has not responded.

(Before Threads was introduced, Mr. Musk individually dared Mr. Zuckerberg to combat a “cage match.”)

What Mr. Musk lacks at Twitter, Mr. Zuckerberg has in abundance at Meta: monumental audiences. More than three billion customers repeatedly go to Mr. Zuckerberg’s constellation of apps, together with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Mr. Zuckerberg has had loads of expertise nudging tens of millions of individuals in these apps to make use of one other of the apps. In 2014, as an example, he eliminated Facebook’s non-public messaging service from contained in the social community’s app and compelled folks to obtain one other app, known as Messenger, to proceed utilizing the service.

Threads is now tied intently to Instagram. Users are required to have an Instagram account to enroll. People can import their complete following checklist from Instagram to Threads with only one faucet of the display, saving them from looking for new folks to observe on the service.

On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg instructed there was extra he might do to push Threads’s progress. He had not “turned on many promotions yet” for the app, he wrote in a Threads submit.

Some customers have puzzled why Threads appears to have made its debut with out some primary capabilities which are used to inside Instagram, like a search perform that permits folks to browse trending hashtags.

“There are a lot of features Threads did not launch with, possibly by design, to keep it brand safe” and reduce controversy from the beginning, mentioned Anil Dash, a tech trade veteran and author. “What does that do to the long-term interesting-ness of the network?”

Adam Mosseri, the top of Instagram, mentioned in a Threads submit on Monday that there was a operating checklist of latest options so as to add to the brand new app that folks have requested. “They say, ‘make it work, make it great, make it grow,’” he wrote, including, “I promise we will make this thing great.”

Yet bolting on a brand new app to an organization’s present merchandise can finally run out of steam.

In 2011, after Larry Page, Google’s co-founder after which chief govt, cloned Facebook with Google+, customers quickly grew bored of the novelty of the brand new social community and stopped utilizing it. Some noticed Google+ as one thing that was pressured on them whereas they had been simply attempting to achieve entry to their Gmail.

Former Google workers described the product as “fear-based,” constructed solely in response to Facebook and and not using a clear imaginative and prescient of why folks must be utilizing it as an alternative of a competing community. In a autopsy of what went improper, one ex-Googler wrote that Google+ primarily outlined itself by “what it wasn’t — i.e. Facebook.”

Of course Mr. Zuckerberg might pull a Bill Gates with Threads. Mr. Gates, a founding father of Microsoft, constructed his empire on Windows, the working system that powered a era of non-public computer systems — after which efficiently used that scale to crush opponents.

Once Windows dominated PCs, Mr. Gates famously bundled different merchandise with the software program without spending a dime. When he did that in 1995 by packaging the online browser Internet Explorer with Windows, Internet Explorer quickly changed into the default browser on tens of millions of computer systems, overtaking the then-dominant browser, Netscape, in simply 4 years.

Even so, Mr. Gates was finally stung by the tactic. In 1998, the Justice Department sued Microsoft for unfairly utilizing Windows’ market energy to snuff out the competitors. In 2000, a federal decide ruled against Mr. Gates’s company, saying that Microsoft had put an “oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune.”

Microsoft later settled with the federal government and agreed to make concessions.