One of the big things holding back Threads, Meta's rival to Twitter, is that it lacked a web version. Not any more. We reported that the web app was coming this week and now it's here: threads.net is now live for everybody, enabling you to muck about on the social network while everybody thinks you're working.
That's not a joke: as we've previously pointed out, one of the things that helped Twitter get so big was people posting from their PCs and laptops when they were supposed to be working.
This is a really important update. Threads is by no means a finished product, but the introduction of this feature should reverse the post-launch slump that's been evident in your feed. And for many users it's likely to be another nail in X/Twitter's coffin.
What can you do on the Threads website?
According to Threads itself, you can read, you can post and you can add photos and videos, reply and repost, search for profiles, view your own profile and see your notifications.
Some features are still absent. As with the phone app there's no direct messaging function yet, and there's no search feature for content. The promised integration with other social networks via ActivityPub, which is also used by Mastodon, is also still on the to-do list. It's also very sparse and doesn't make great use of all the space now available to it. So clearly there's still a lot of work to be done here.
That said, the web app is likely to make a very big and very noticeable difference to your Threads feed whether you view it on your phone or on the web. Many of the people on my various social media feeds have been waiting for the web app because they prefer to post from their PCs or Macs; that's been the case for me too. As a result Threads has felt to me like a social network in waiting: lots of interesting people had signed up for it, but few of them were posting interesting things.
I think that's particularly the case with people sharing content, such as news articles (which Twitter is planning to make less useful by removing their headlines): I know that almost all the content I share on social media is shared from my Mac; I've tried doing it on the Threads phone app but it's a serious PITA.
None of this guarantees that Threads will be a Twitter killer. Maybe Twitter was the unique snowflake of the social media world. But Threads just got a whole lot more useful, and I think you'll see that in your feed very soon.
