Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees Threads as the next billion-user social network

Mark Zuckerberg said the rest of 2023 will be about creating stability for employees and removing barriers that slow them down

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expects Threads, the company's new text-based conversation app, to become the next billion-user social network in its suite of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

"I think we are off to a great start and I'm optimistic that over time this could be a fifth great app in the Family of Apps. But we have a lot of basic work to do to really make Threads reach its full potential" Zuckerberg said during the company's earnings conference call on July 26.

"I think it has been sort of this weird anomalous thing in the tech industry that there hasn't been an app for public discussions like this (Threads) that has reached 1 billion people."

Instagram launched Threads earlier this month as the company's answer to rival the social platform formerly known as Twitter. The app clocked 100 million sign-ups in less than five days of its launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer product across the world. However, it has witnessed a significant decline in usage in the subsequent days.

This is likely because Threads still has limited features. It lacks basic features such as a fully functional web interface, an edit button, the ability to support multiple accounts and for users to search for posts on the platform. It launched a chronological following feed earlier in the week.

Last week, Zuckerberg said "tens of millions of people" were returning to Threads on a daily basis and the network planned to focus on improving the app's "basics and retention" for the rest of the year.

No plans to monetise yet

During the earnings call, Zuckerberg admitted that they still have a "lot of basic functionality to build" and fine-tune the service to retain users.

"Once we feel like we're in a very good place on that, then I'm highly confident that we're going to be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow," Zuckerberg said.

These developments come at a time when many Twitter (now X) users are looking for alternative services, frustrated by various product and policy changes by owner Elon Musk that have reshaped the platform.

"In general, we haven't had a lot of success with building standalone apps. Part of me wonders if this is just a kind of classic venture capital portfolio question, where you try a bunch of things and a bunch of them don't work. And then every once in a while, one hits and is a much bigger success. It could be that or it could just be that this is such an idiosyncratic case because of all the factors that are happening around Twitter or X, I guess, it's called now," Zuckerberg said.

He also said the company was not in a hurry to monetise the service. "In a few years, once we get to the point where it's at hundreds of millions of people, if assuming we can get there, then we'll worry about monetisation," he said.

Meta chief also mentioned Threads as the biggest example for its "year of efficiency" efforts, since the service was built by a "relatively small team on a tight timeline".

Over the past year, Meta has taken several measures to aggressively cut costs, has laid off over 21,000 people, and flattened its organisational structure.

Zuckerberg said they had already seen several examples of how a leaner organisation and some of the cultural changes can build higher quality products faster, which was one of the key objectives of its efficiency efforts.

"Now that we've gotten through the major layoffs, the rest of 2023 will be about creating stability for employees, removing barriers that slow us down, introducing new AI-powered tools to speed us up, and so on," he said.

In the second quarter of 2023, Meta's profit grew by 16 percent year on year to $7.8 billion, while revenue was up 11 percent to $32 billion, signalling a rebound in the digital advertising market.

The company's flagship app Facebook also reached a key milestone during the quarter, crossing 3 billion monthly active users for the first time. Overall, more than 3.8 billion people use at least one of Meta's apps on a monthly basis, it said.

"We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I've seen in a while with Llama 2, Threads, Reels, new AI products in the pipeline, and the launch of Quest 3 this fall" Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Llama 2, or Large Language Model Meta AI, is the tech giant's open-source artificial intelligence model that was introduced on July 18.