The famous photo and video sharing social networking platform, Instagram is planning to shut down its standalone messaging service, the Threads. According to reports by TechCrunch, the company confirmed that Thread will cease to exist by the end of 2021. Starting November 23rd, the social app will start to display a notification prompting users to return to Instagram.
Instagram’s Threads was introduced in 2019 which is quite unarguably similar to Facebook Messenger. Thread allowed users to interact by sending and receiving Instagram DMs through a dedicated messaging interface outside of the main app. Over time Thread has boasted of a collection of quirky features, which includes automatic statuses which the app could set for you based on what your phone was doing. According to a statement, Meta says that all the quirky tools and features users enjoy will now be available on the Instagram App once Threads eventually shuts down.
Meta also says that it is in the process of consolidating its many messaging platforms. This means that Messenger and Instagram will now both support cross-platform messaging. The company also disclosed its plans to incorporate WhatsApp as well in the near future. Although many do not support the idea of shutting down Threads, a messaging app solely connected and dependent on Instagram, however, the existence of the app will continue to make less sense of the cross-platform integration Meta is planning between Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. The 3 social platforms by Meta suffered a major world outage some weeks ago, which left users unable to interact using these platforms for a number of hours.
The case for shutting down also makes more sense when it was discovered that not a heck of a lot of people utilizes Threads, to begin with. As of last year, the app had barely just over 200,000 users a tiny fraction compared to the huge number of Instagram users which runs into millions. Last year even though, Meta tried quite a number of things like redesigning the app entirely and expanding its use cases from just the close friends’ list to all users in a bid to evoke and spark up usage around the world, but Meta’s effort seemed insufficient enough to save the app from an eventual shutdown.
According to a statement by Instagram spokesperson, Christine Pai she said: “We know that people care about connecting with their close friends, and we’ve seen this particularly over the past few years with the growth of messaging on Instagram.” Pai added, “We’re now focusing our efforts on enhancing how you connect with close friends on Instagram and deprecating the Threads app.”