Facebook has made available to everyone Threads, a new application to exchange messages with your closest contacts on Instagram. Some features of the app had already been revealed last August by technology sites, but without Instagram providing confirmation. Threads has been designed to make it easier to exchange content – photos and videos – with your friends, satisfying the growing demand of users for spaces where they can stay in touch only with the people they care about most through social networks. Some features of the new app, such as the ability to create automatic status updates, however, raise some privacy concerns and seem (very) Snapchat inspired.
When started, Threads remembers the camera apps: the first thing you see is in fact the framing provided by the lens of your smartphone. The idea is to provide a system that is immediately ready to take a picture or video to share with your friends. You cannot add filters to the contents as is the case with the classic Instagram app. Your favorite contacts can be added to the bottom of the screen, so you can turn the contents around more quickly, without having to search for them later in the friends list.
Threads also has a section from which you can read and send messages, very similar to the internal Instagram chat. Unlike the latter, however, in the new chat only the contacts that have been indicated as closest and with whom you have more confidence are visible. There is also the possibility to start group chats, but only if each participant is on the list of closest friends of the others.
The most controversial part of Threads is the ability to add automatic status updates, which are handled directly by the application. In this case, the app uses the information on your location and the activities typically carried out during the day, gradually changing your status. Each status update is accompanied by an emoji, which illustrates the activity that is taking place. Instagram says that it will not keep the exact location of each user in its systems and that the automatic statuses are derived from the context, and from the changes made by users when instead they decide to manually indicate the activity they are doing.
Information on automatic statuses will also only be shown to your closest contacts, but the fact that Threads offers rather insistent messages to activate the new feature does not appeal to those involved in privacy. The app is likely to be used by many teens, who don't always have a clue how tracking their online activities works, and who may therefore be providing more information to Facebook (which controls Instagram which controls Threads) and other people in their circles. acquaintances.
Anticipating controversy and criticism over automatic statuses, Instagram accompanied the launch of Threads with a post dedicated to privacy. The company explained that the new app will use information such as: “your location, your movements, your battery level and connection to the cellular network to determine what context information to share”. That's a lot of information, but remember that several other applications collect similar information, even if they don't turn it into an automatic status update.
Many have observed that Threads has elements in common with Snapchat, an application from which Facebook has drawn a lot of inspiration in recent years to radically change Instagram. Snapchat constantly faces intense competition from Instagram and could suffer even more, considering that until now the Facebook app had conducted few experiments around the systems to exchange messages directly, functions where Snapchat has always been more successful. Earlier this year Instagram had closed Direct, an app that allowed you to use its chat separately from the rest of the social network, evidently to devote more attention to the development of Threads.
