IT Essentials: The Threads of Twitter's demise

Musk and Zuckerberg's literal cage match has turned digital, but no less vicious.

Computing Towers relocated this week. From the heart of Covent Garden, we've moved (whisper it) south of the river, to Borough: an area so trendy that I spontaneously manifested a Hawaiian shirt as soon as I crossed London Bridge.

Relocating always means big changes in new surroundings, and it can take time to settle in and get used to how things work. How does my security pass work the lift? What's the etiquette around the office fridge? And where, for the love of God, can I get a decent coffee?

That's what millions (if reports are to be believed) of people are struggling with this week as they jump from Twitter's sinking ship to Meta's new social network, Threads.

Zuckerberg might be pitching the Instagram-linked platform as a "friendly" rival, but make no mistake: there's blood in the water.

Since buying Twitter in October, Elon Musk has been running it so haphazardly that he might almost be setting up for failure on purpose.

The platform is now worth less than a third of what Musk initially paid; quite an achievement for a social network that last reported a profit in 2019.

The Tesla owner could have accepted a rival with grace and aplomb, but he's Elon Musk so instead he threatened to sue Meta for stealing trade secrets.

The lawsuit revolves around Meta hiring former Twitter engineers who had "improperly" kept certain documents and information. I'm sure I don't need to point that the irony in this situation being entirely of Musk's own making.

And how is the experience? Are people fumbling around looking for the coffee machine, or are they already au fait with tweeting threading?

Early reports suggest the latter, with Meta having closely copied Twitter's layout and features. Hashtags, direct messages and trending stories aren't included yet, but everything else is nearly identical.

And while I, and many others, are hesitant to present Meta with yet more of our personal data, it was nice to open a micro-blogging app and actually see content.