From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch Twitter, via attorney Alex Spiro, has accused Meta of stealing trade secrets following the launch of Meta's Threads app, a would-be rival text-focused social media network. Meta launched Threads on Wednesday for iOS and Android, describing it as "a new app, built by the Instagram team, for sharing text updates and joining …
"Instead of a cage fight, can we please just dig a very deep hole, dump them all in there, fill it nicely again, plant a forest on top and forget about it all?"
...signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
Instead of a cage fight, can we please just dig a very deep hole, dump them all in there, fill it nicely again
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
Zuck cannot do that. The U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO emoji is Musk's trademark.
(TheRegister has too high standards to let me include that emoji directly in a comment but I think it would make an excellent googlebomb.)
::sigh:: unbloodybelievable. If you have the resources to support the back end - which zuck does - how difficult would it be to clone Twitter? Not very, I'd guess - no need to suck secrets out of former employees, though I imagine there would be no shortage of disgruntled former twits lining up for the pleasure of doing so.
It's called competition. You make a service, and if it's good enough, people use it. If it's not, someone makes a better version and people use that instead. The idea is that you make the most popular toy, or you fail. When it turns out you're not the most popular, you do not threaten legal action against those who are, you improve your product or you abandon it. Such is life.
Speaking of popular, I see that threads is claiming to have acquired 30 million users already, according to various news outlets. The BBC, at least, made reference to privacy concerns, and I'm sure at least some other reports will have touched on that too. Doesn't seem to have dampened enthusiasm very much, does it?
I should think that most of them will be existing Instagram users, so they're accustomed to having their data hoovered up and don't have a problem with it. It would be interesting to know how many new users have signed up with Instagram just so they can play with threads.
Certainly, I won't be doing that. I don't have an Instagram account, I don't want one, and I'm not about to create one just to see what the fuss is about.
This zuck / musk feud looks like it might have some legs, though. Popcorn required, I think.
"That's mainly the EU, the UK will just do what the US tells it to do."
Nothing new there, then. But my point is that privacy concerns are widely known / referred to in mainstream media, and still the users pour in. The implication is that the average user doesn't give a monkeys about privacy, they just want to play with the new toys. Which, from my own experience of domestic users, is broadly accurate. Sure, there are some who won't go near the net without antivirus, firewall, VPN and private browsing firmly in place, but they are the tiny minority. The rest don't care and think you're weird if you do.
True. There's nothing technologically revolutionary about Twitter. What was revolutionary at the time of launch was the format. That's what made it. It was the first time I had a social media experience that just "clicked". Musk doesn't understand this. He understands very little about this space, and he has diluted it by allowing longer tweets. Much longer. That was never the point. If you wanted that, there was TwitLonger. Free users of Twitter are not freeloaders, something else he can't comprehend. The users are the product. The data and the ads are the business.
"If you have the resources to support the back end - which zuck does - how difficult would it be to clone Twitter? Not very, I'd guess "
On a similar note, what are these Trade Secrets they speak of? I thought "trade secrets" was just your own special process or way of doing things that you don't tell anyone about. Something in the normal course of events you might patent, but since patenting stuff makes it public and allows others to copy using workarounds, you don't patent it. So, by definition, it seems "trade secrets" are unprotected and it's probably quite a high bar to demonstrate in law that someone "stole" them rather than independently came up with their own version, however similar, simply by looking at how your process or device works.
IANAL, so are trade secrets something else and are protected in some way?
"As most people are not on either and don't give a gnat's fart..."
Correct, if course. But, in my experience, people on twitter tend to take it all very seriously. Someone said something they don't like on twitter? They saddle up their trusty battle keyboard and ride off to war, often not to be seen for hours.
Snarky comments are exchanged, Google is searched for things to back up their argument / disprove the other's, friends are recruited to join the fray, until they emerge hours later, tired, dehydrated, hungry and slightly crosseyed, claiming victory because the opponent finally got bored and went to bed/ blocked them etc.
They seem to think that it matters, that they are somehow making a difference, and they just don't seem to understand that the rest of us don't give that gnat's fart about who said what on twitter.
Someone said something they don't like on twitter? They saddle up their trusty battle keyboard and ride off to war, often not to be seen for hours.
Snarky comments are exchanged, Google is searched for things to back up their argument / disprove the other's, friends are recruited to join the fray, until they emerge hours later, tired, dehydrated, hungry and slightly crosseyed, claiming victory because the opponent finally got bored and went to bed/ blocked them etc.
They seem to think that it matters, that they are somehow making a difference, and they just don't seem to understand that the rest of us don't give that gnat's fart about who said what on twitter.
Ummmm.
Mods? Can we get this comment about 100,000 upvotes please?
@The Man Who Fell To Earth: “Is that it has no IP. It's basically a text messaging platform my kid could write in an afternoon, and scale it on AWS the next day.”
What passes for the media now-a-days has found it useful in disseminating their typings. Whole articles are constructed out of a single Tweet. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram etc, have been useful in governments shutting down "disinformation". This was the case with Twitter, until Musk bought it and released the "Twitter Files". I suspect all the trashing of Musk in the so-called media are to enthuse him to return to the fold and get with the program.
@gandalfcn: "Put your tinfoil hat on and stop drinking the fantasy juice."
Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine
“They are soldiers, but the 77th Brigade edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts. Welcome to the age of information warfare”
>Either your kid is an adult tech professional or you've never worked on a large system before.
There are alot of adult tech professionals who have never worked on large systems.
I remember being in a meeting (circa 2002) with a supplier of enterprise CRM, their team was going on about how easy some housekeeping tasks were, something caused me to ask the question as to what was the largest database they had experience of, back came the confident reply 200GB; which caused my DB designer to point out their sizing calculator/model showed our initial DB would be 1.5TB with index tables with over a million entries...
I admit to having zero knowledge of what housekeeping is like with a Petabyte (or two) DB...
> I admit to having zero knowledge of what housekeeping is like with a Petabyte (or two) DB...
Neither have I.[1]
But if there is anything good about Meta, one is that they (hopefully) *do* have access to that knowledge.
Maybe after his kid has done the work of an afternoon, the rest of the month could be spent by Meta's guys changing the flat-file into something more scalable?
[1] for which I'm thankful, tbh. Sounds all very stressful, even just swapping all the floppies to make a backup.
Per a *fairly* large consultancy group W/R/T Oracle's financial platform circa 2006/7
............ "Each table will need it's own spindle, and an index spindle, this provides the responsiveness required to make the platform stable ........"
We quietly pointed out that tables + indexes on the relevant DB's summed up to 56,000+ .........
Gotta wonder where some of these "Highly Experienced Professional Consultants" acquired the *cough* experience.
Twitter handles a huge amount of data and I expect there is some really clever engineering going on behind the scenes, but you've hit on an important truth here. Perhaps the most important thing that Lone Skum did not understand was that he was buying a community and he needed to operate it in terms of maintaining that community.
Instead he acted like he had a technology product and proceeded to chase the users away by making it progressively more obnoxious and harder to use, destroying its value in the process. The thing that made Twitter worthwhile was that for a long time everyone was there. I doubt there will be another platform like it after this fragmentation.
Twitter's management had been walking the tightrope of maintaining that userbase for a long time. I think had he not bought them out, they might have been failing by now anyway - being the poster children for "grow first, monetise later" starts to get tough when the interest rates on your loans are rising fast and you still haven't got around to making significant amounts of money.
Funnily enough none of my friends or family have ever been on Twitter.
None of my work colleages has ever mentioned being on Twitter.
I have never had a Twitter account either.
Are there any real people on Twitter at all or is it just billionaires, celebrities, scammers and conspiracy theorists?
"Are there any real people on Twitter at all or is it just billionaires, celebrities, scammers and conspiracy theorists?"
Mostly, but also journalists who see it as an easy story source, and a shedload of activists, crusaders, campaigners and general malcontents, most of whom are not unadjacent to the tin foil brigade, and hope to get their cause under the nose of said lazy journalists.
Your community argument also works in that working with a community requires you to participate in that community instead of acting like an entitled child throwing tantrums if things don't go your way.
Aside from Musk's "management" (sorry, took me a moment to convince my fingers to type that), he exacerbated the damage he caused by imposing no limits on himself, and that was basically the last straw for many.
Never give this man a double barrelled shotgun without wrapping his feet in body armour..
There is a very good word in the English language which economically describes this action of Musk's: "risible". Risible is defined as any action or position taken which is "...so lacking in quality or usefulness that it deserves to be laughed at...". Other definitions include 'absurd', 'stupid', 'silly', 'bird-brained' (how absolutely apt)...
Mr Musk now has a long history of demonstrating that this single word can be applied, a priori, to any course of action he might pursue.
We're often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be duplicated bought.
I'ma bet that if you offered the entirety of the twitteratti $2.50/month for a year to switch to {alternate platform of the moment} you'd obtain at least 60% of them. Trust me, the vast majority of them are purchasable.
I have to hand it to Zuck, as much as I despise that lizard-man posing as a human you gotta admit tying it to Instagram was a stroke of genius. The reason the average person goes to Twitter is for celebrities/influencers they follow. Pretty much all those people already have Instagram accounts, so creating a Threads profile which instantly has all of your existing Instragram follower/followed relationships intact make it a super easy transition.
Yeah per reports it is still kinda rough and buggy since was rushed when it was supposed to be released a month from now - but after Musk's big fuckup last weekend I can see why they wanted to strike now. Given that Twitter is kinda rough and buggy itself that's not a problem, especially if Threads gets better over time when Twitter will almost certainly continue to get worse.
The problem for other wannabe Twitter competitors, or new social media apps in general is that when you join a new service there is no one there yet, and you have to recreate all the relationships (follow, friend, whatever) That's why it is a lot easier for something new to come along and appeal to teenagers - they don't already have the weight of those existing relationships. This is exactly why Facebook has remained unchallenged as the biggest social media platform as newer platforms get hot for a while (Vines, Snapchat) and then fizzle out, replaced by even newer ones like Tik Tok...and so on.
By leveraging the existing Instagram connections, this enables all the people who actually make money from social media to easily move to Threads since they have a built in audience composed of their Instagram followers. That makes it a much better alternative than Bluesky, let alone crap like Mastadon which may be many a techie's wet dream but never was going to be something to appeal to the masses. If enough people with big follower counts dial back their postings on Twitter and post more on Threads, the masses will follow them, and Twitter could become a ghost town in a matter of months.
Sounds like you don't understand the underlying tech.
Threads is an activityPub app, it uses the same protocol as "crap like Mastadon", but it allows you to sign up using instagram creds.
In the future, in theory, threads could federate with Mastadon instances.
Could but may well not end up federated with a lot of Mastodon instances because by and large the community there does not have any trust at all for Meta. They'll have to work very hard to demonstrate that they have something to offer and aren't just planning some further embrace and extend bullshit, which is what the Fediverse community are bracing for.
If Threads hides all those messy details from the end user then that is why it is succeeding when previous attempts to get people onto Mastadon where a completely and total failure. I remember when I read something about Mastadon and it had an example of how to sign up where you had to select your server. I quit reading immediately as I knew it would never catch on beyond tech geeks.
This is the problem with sending the poop emoji out as a default press response: the media will naturally jump on any story that shows the business in a bad light (yes, I know: spoiled for choice when it comes to the man-child's machinations). '30 million users in the first month', 'works just like Twitter', etc. are wonderful marketing messages that, thanks to the likes of the BBC et al, have reached a far wider audience than anything the Cyborg's team could have come up with themselves. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a very significant upward spike to Threads' user-base as a result of this free publicity.
<sarcasm>Nice move, Musk</sarcasm>
Some papers reported that the lawsuit accuses MS of "poaching" Twitter engineers, which made me laugh. Buy a company, sack all the engineers who won't sign up to working 24/7 for no extra pay, then sack some of the ones who did sign up, then accuse your competitor of "poaching" the engineers you sacked.
I'm reading that treads wants access to nearly all of the data on your phone, but surely most users already agreed to give access to pictures/files/camera/microphone/location/address book/kidneys/whatever else is left when you signed up to instagram, which threads seems to be piggybacked on? And I'm sure twatter probably wanted the same when anyone signs up to it.
So what's changed? We all know the money is in the data they can scrape from us and then sell to the advertisers.
I don't have either of these, but i'm sure by the end of next week my partner will be adding it to the growing list of apps to scroll through - to me it all looks like a hard way to check what a few relatives and a couple of pop groups are up to.
Please can we just go back to having separate web sites for what interests us?
If I'm not mistaken, all Meta apps like WhatsApp check their access to all the goodies they want to grab, and will stone cold refuse to work until you provide full access. Not only will they not even install unless you give them full access, they will check every time they start up as well.
Zuck is evil, not stupid.
> Not only will they not even install unless you give them full access, they will check every time they start up as well.
There are no Meta apps on my phone but I'm an Android and iOS dev so I know a thing or two about writing and publishing apps...
The first part of your statement is NOT POSSIBLE. Apps are installed from the relevant app store and Google / Apple DOES NOT enforce Meta's requirements before install. It just isn't possible to do that.
On every run, yes they probably ask for permission to check your colon and refuse to run without it but it is not possible for an app to ask for permissions before installation and refuse to install if not given access.
You are mistaken and Zuck is still evil.
They may be thinking of earlier versions of Android, where permissions were specified and granted at install time. This wasn't just the first versions of Android. Through many of them (I'm not sure when this changed), it was normal to see the message "Do you want to install this app? It will get access to:". IOS never did that, at least I've never seen it, and Android doesn't do that anymore, but for many years, it was structured that way.
"former employees had access to confidential company information, "owe ongoing obligations to Twitter"...
Excuse me?!?!
You fired these people, they owe you NOTHING! Of course they had confidential company information, they worked for you. Every employee of a firm has confidential information about that company in their heads. It's called knowledge. They use it to build products for you. But the moment you fire them, they are free to take that knowledge and use it in their future careers elsewhere.
Have an ongoing obligation to Twitter? The cheek of the prick. I wish there was some way this a$$hole Lawyer could be sued for implying that the ex Twitter employees are Serfs that still owe there obligation to their old Master...
California has explicit laws invalidating non-compete clauses in employment contracts.
If anything it is that Musk owes money to former employees.
Anyone who signed an agreement in exchange for severance may owe Twitter ongoing obligations, if that is enforceable. On the other hand, there have been mounting accusations of Musk ignoring labor law. That would certainly come back to bite. There has been no action filed. It sounds like shots across the bow, and it's probably all PR.
If Musk thinks ex-Twitter employees "improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices." he should sue them take it to arbitration pay his arbitration fees.
" not available in Europe"
Plea to editors and writers. Europe is a geographical entity. You are referring to the EU here. This is an important distinction because the UK is in one, and not the other. As, indeed is Switzerland, or Ukraine.
Have the UK data regulation rules actually deviated wildly from the EU rules, so far? GDPR is still in effect, for instance. Admittedly, they may willfully diverge in future. Or is it the rigour of enforcement that is different, or perhaps an expectation that if the UK all out on Brexit dividends the future privacy regimen will be more favourable to Meta/threads. /today/ what's the biggest different in data privacy/security between UK and EU?
The other thing is that the updates to the Digital Services Act take effect soon, I think in August. This means "very large online platform" providers will need to have published a risk assessment of their services. Since both Facebook and Instagram are amongst those platforms, my assumption is that perhaps they don't want the risk assessments they've just elaborately prepared to be invalidated by the addition of Threads to the mix.
Then there's also the judgement of ECJ from 3 days ago that basically allowed Germany to use breaches of GDPR as a basis for monopoly sanctions against Meta. They probably need some time to consider the consequences of the spillover from what was a privacy issue into competition law.
What trade secrets? Facebook already know how to build a scalable social network - they have several. The front end is hardly unique now, with multiple other services using basically the same thing.
Twitter got a patent in 2008 for "a device independent message distribution platform" but it doesn't seem they've ever tried to leverage it in a court case (as they'd lose, as there's a whole pile of prior art that applies, including Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal and others.
So, what exactly is it that Meta have copied that they didn't already do?
I hate social media, it's a cesspit designed to caused mental health problems but using Google+ as my example, Threads will be dead in 12 months once people realise that none of their mates are on it.
Threads only has one useful thing, it's from a well known and trusted (*) company, so people may use it over lesser known Mastodon or bog standard Twitter but I don't think so once the novelty wears off. Young people are brainwashed by TikTok and they might use Instagram but certainly not the old fogey network Facebook where Aunt Molly Sugden posts pictures of her pussy!
I'll put money down right now that within 24 months Facebook will have to shutter Threads due to lack of interest. If Google with all it's clout cannot get people to use a social network and had to close it, what make's you think the world oldest teenager Zuckerberg will fair any better?
( * - "trusted" I mean morons who use social media know about who owns it and still don't give a crap about being human data generation machines! )
I don't think that's how it's going to go. I think Threads will take off, because people's mates WILL be on it, as they are already on Instagram. I can easily see Threads eclipsing Twitter within weeks if it works reasonably well. It's not a huge leap from IG. Let's not forget that Twitter owes a lot of creditors a lot of money. If Threads gains even moderate success, investors will get itchy feet and Twitter will have trouble raising capital.
I can easily see Threads eclipsing Twitter within weeks if it works reasonably well
Make that days. I don't think you'll have to wait until next week Friday before they've surpassed the sad lot that stuck with Twitter, for a number of simple reasons:
- Zuck is using the existing Instagram base which brings along the required networks to draw others in;
- even since Musk got his hands on Twitter, advertisers and users have been on the lookout for alternatives that were not populated by crazy right wing loons, or were at least taken offline in a timely manner, so it fills a need the world didn't even know it had until Musk screwed it up;
- there are plenty who are looking to annoy Musk - that alone should make them sail past the user count of Twitter in days.
The problem with Mastodon is that it's distributed, where Twitter worked precisely because it was centralised. As long as Zuck fights the temptation to stick it too full of ads and features that get in the way of functionality I suspect Musk will face having to sell off more shares or admit he screwed up and start closing the shop by next week. I cannot see the latter happen, but I think you are right: the former will not happen either without some robust questions from his shareholders.
He may have to sell tickets to that cage fight, just to cope :).
Twitter's basic functionality is not that complex; I suspect a decent team of a half dozen developers could roll out a pretty good prototype in a matter of a few months, and have it perform better than Musk's albatross. So many people think their ideas are "unique" when they were just the first to lawyer up over the idea, while dozens if not hundreds of people have had the same or similar ideas around the world, but chose not to pursue or didn't get there in time to be the first to lawyer up.
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