Remember Threads? In the Meta vs Twitter (sorry, sorry – X) tussle, Zuckerberg and co. didn’t land any fatal blows. Threads, however, has not given in despite losing a huge percentage (close to 75%, according to some reports) of its initial US users, and continues to update and improve its platform. Threads, launched in July, might soon introduce Trending Topics and, moreover, we get to see what it could look like (via 9to5Mac).
As the title suggests, this alleged Trending Topics feature will help users find hot posts on even hotter and viral topics on the platform at the given moment.
There is no official Meta confirmation on the Trending Topics yet, but a haphazard Meta employee managed to accidentally post a now-deleted screenshot of the feature on a phone. An app developer by the name of Willian Max was fast enough to make a screenshot before it disappeared.
“Just to be clear: I’m not a “leaker” or anything like that. I simply follow many engineers and employees working at Meta, and one of them accidentally posted a screenshot that was meant to be private. Fortunately for us, I happened to see it at the right moment. I will not disclose who posted the screenshot for obvious reasons”, Max says.
If that is the final look of the feature, it sure is minimalistic – there’s a search bar at the top of the screen. A list of trending topics at the moment, with the number of total posts on each of the most commented topics. For example, at the time of the screenshot, the most viral and talked about thing was Drake’s new album, For All the Dogs. On a side note: on it, there’s a song about Android and iPhone…
It’s not clear when (and if) this feature will be rolled out to Threads, but there’s another thing coming down the road that’s bound to happen sometime in the coming three months – the ability to remove your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account as well. As you probably know by now, the two are superglued together and until now, those who wished to opt out of Threads had to kiss their Instagram account, too.
Meta’s chief privacy officer for product, Michel Protti, says:
Technically, it was extremely challenging to allow deletion of a separate Threads account without also deleting your overall Instagram account out of the gate. So, we paid particular attention to ensuring the user could still exercise their deletion rights, by deactivating the account to sort of hide all content, setting it to private or deleting individual threads.
