Mark Zuckerberg's Threads has gotten off to a strong start. Despite some criticisms (and a cease-and-desist letter from Elon Musk) which accuse Meta of copying Twitter's entire layout, the new platform gained more than 100 million users in just five days.
This surge in growth has positioned Threads as a real competitor to Twitter, something one of Twitter's own engineers admitted. In these early days, though, Threads is a relatively bare-bones app. It does, however, have a handful of features that Instagram's head, Adam Mosseri, highlighted as "hidden gems."
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The first of these gems is that users can "decide who can reply to your thread." When a user starts a new thread, they can adjust a setting to enable anyone to reply, or just a few specific users.
Thread's composer also features a shortcut -- when a user taps "return" three times, the composer will open a new thread.
Mosseri highlighted two more features -- "Quick Follow" and "Mute" -- which easily enable users to mute an account by tapping the three dots, or to follow an account by tapping the plus button, without having to go to that account's page.
Threads also has a feature in its settings called "Take a Break." When active, the app will remind users to step away, to avoid getting pulled into the social media vortex.
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When users press and hold on the search icon, Threads will automatically open search and, at the same time, will pull up the keyboard.
Mosseri's final "hidden gem" is a feature that links Threads and Instagram; users can share a Thread to their Instagram feed or story by tapping the airplane at the bottom of every post.
"The team is working on a long list of features that we know we need to build into that app: a following feed, the edit button, the ability to support multiple accounts, post search, eventually hashtags, a web presence, translations, and many, many more things," Mosseri said, adding that there is "a lot more to come."
(META) -) stock was up more than 3% Wednesday.
