My mate Zuck (Mark Zuckerberg, for those of you who don’t know him) made it easy for me to sign up because I could use my Instagram account to transport my accumulated accomplishments, including my handsome visage, across to Threads with a flick of an arthritic paw.
Among my 98 million friends rushing to join Threads were Oprah, Albo, Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, not to mention Gordon Ramsay. As you can see, I’m punching above my weight.
My swift endorsement of Threads has upset Twitter’s owner Elon Musk, who sent Zuck a “cease and desist” letter Saturday morning, claiming Zuck had copied Twitter and pinched its staff; although, given Elon has sacked around 4000 people since he took over Twitter a year ago, there must be some former Twitter people a trifle hungry by now and grateful for sustenance.
Anyway, these two very rich chaps — they were mates, once — have been growling like dogs circling and sniffing each other. Things started going sour when Zuck rented one of Elon’s Space X rockets to launch his proposed low-orbit satellite internet service over Africa; Elon’s rocket blew up on take-off, nuking Zuck’s satellite. Elon wasn’t that apologetic, saying Zuck probably had insurance.
The launch catastrophe followed a few tough years for Zuck, starting with Cambridge Analytica feeding people misinformation on Facebook, allowing Russian bots and evildoers to influence the American elections and letting his money-making algorithm entice kids into burgers, bullying and weird conspiracies. He needed some light relief — but instead watched on as Elon fired up Starlink, his low-orbit satellite internet service, with great success.
The sniping between Zuck and Elon continued until they recently challenged each other to an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage fight — Zuck is a 39-year-old jiu-jitsu practitioner, whereas Elon is a slightly overweight 52-year-old with no martial arts experience. But he got Tesla going, to the surprise of the world, so who knows? And he has a Japanese hunting dog, a shiba inu named Floki, who might comfortably take out Zuck’s stringy Hungarian sheep-doggy thing, named Puli, if the dogs are in the cage too.
The welcome relief for Zuck was watching Elon’s mis-steps with Twitter, as he fired half the staff, charged for the ‘blue tick’ that Twitter assigned to reliable sources and invited the seasoned liar Donald Trump back on it (the Don has declined, so far). He also dispensed with much of the moderation to keep hate speech and loonies off Twitter. Advertisers ran in all directions and people started looking for alternatives.
In comes Zuck with a smirk on his face: since Instagram has around a billion users, his clever move to allow Instagram users to join Threads easily has allowed massive growth in just a few days, which shows no sign of stopping.
The astonishing rush to join is as much a protest to Elon as it is a vote in favour — because Threads doesn’t actually work as well as Twitter: it’s just this endless stream of postings which you can’t trim to see only the dogs you follow: you cop the whole stream. This is tedious for a discerning dog, so I don’t know what I’ll do with it.
But I’m there — you can follow me @thebossesdog2. And I’ll follow you back. Woof!
