So... if you work for Twitter and then go work somewhere else, Twitter will sue your new employer? That's a stellar recruiting strategy.
Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
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Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#82Great news for tech workers imo. Part of the tech labor market downturn has been driven by skepticism over the costs: if Twitter can slash its workforce and keep running just fine, why can’t other companies? Well, Threads swooping in to rapidly drain Twitter’s market share might change that reasoning.
Are there really more than a few hundred people working on Threads? I believe Twitter had ~7,500 at its peak. Even if Threads succeeds, its not going to be because they have meaningfully more employees. Cloning twitter is a fairly easy technical problem nowadays... in contrast to early 2010s era of no-cloud, poor infra management and so on
It's not really possible to say how many people are "working on" Threads, I bet. Threads is using Meta infrastructure. Should all those employees count towards Threads employees? How about HR? Legal? Internal tools? Building staff? Security? etc etc.
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree... follower graph would be pretty important to bootstrap a Twitter like experience. My follower graph on Twitter looks quite different than Instagram or Facebook. The letter also explicitly calls out follower graph and following data which is why I mention it.
Meta already has a massive follower graph from using Instagram for signin. When I logged in to Threads, it added my entire follower list of hundreds from Instagram. Also, Instagram already links Instagram accounts with Facebook accounts for the majority of users so they graph is even bigger than that (with Facebook friends).
I'm not arguing that... I'm saying that my follower graph for facebook (mostly family) and instagram (mostly friends and diy etc) looks very different than my Twitter graph because the use cases are very different. I would say there is less than 25% overlap between my Twitter social graph and my Meta social graph. If I was bootstrapping a platform like Twitter it would be nice to be able to recommend accounts to follow based on a similar platform (Twitter). Again I have no evidence of anything here... it was literally just two temporally related events that seemed interesting.
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#84what exactly they stole? threads is basically a stripped-down version of fb/ig feeds
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#85Instagram has a much higher MAU so meta can argue they know how to make and retain audience. Twitter will have to prove actual secrets were stolen and that's going to be a tough sell I feel
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#86Whose responsibility is it to prove these claims? Do our courts put the burden on the accuser or the accused to prove these? I hope Twitter has to spend the money upfront and come up with proof rather than just filing a frivolous lawsuit and making the other party spend.
Letters like this aren't delivered under oath and don't cost much. They can blather as much as they want and try to re-frame the story from "Elon Musk destroyed Twitter" to "Elon Musk was rescuing Twitter until Zucc hired traitorous IP thieves and they destroyed Twitter."
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree... follower graph would be pretty important to bootstrap a Twitter like experience. My follower graph on Twitter looks quite different than Instagram or Facebook. The letter also explicitly calls out follower graph and following data which is why I mention it.
What use is a follower graph if it doesn't correlate to the accounts on your platform? They have pushed this claim without evidence and Meta has denied them outright. The onus is on Musk's team to produce proof now.
I'm not sure I follow. I'd estimate there's less than a 25% overlap between my Twitter social graph and my Meta (instagram + facebook) social graph. If I was going to build a system to recommend accounts to follow it sure would be handy to know what accounts you followed on the platform most related to the one I'm building. Again I have 0 evidence of anything as I've said and of course its on Musk's team to prove it but just thought the timing and specific wording chosen in the letter was interesting.
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Didn't Twitter open source a large portion of the code base? Seems like that isn't going to help their case.
It also doesn't help that the basic functionality of Twitter can be duplicated in a weekend by a junior dev, and has been many times. What novel idea can be stolen from Twitter? Everyone already lifted the hashtag idea ~15 years ago.
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#89I'm curious what exactly X is claiming Meta stole? The interface and interaction model is basically just social media best practices that have been evolved by numerous people and companies over the past 20-30 years. Seemingly nothing so complex that it needs to be stolen from another company. Barely any art assets. Dirt-simple interfaces. Under-the-hood, I assume Meta was able to launch this quickly because it's larg…
I recall this past winter when Elon claimed that Twitter’s tech was so bad it needed a “complete and total rewrite.” https://twitter.com/goldman/status/1605438532260048896?lang=...
Whatever Meta did or didn’t steal, sounds like he shouldn’t consider it particularly advantageous anyway /s
Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
#90> Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets [...] This sentence is clearly trying to establish liability by accusing Meta of wilful infringement of Twitter’s rights (i.e. it acted in full knowledge of these fact, even though they may lead to violation of the employees’ restrictive covenants, etc.), as evidenced by t…
Doesn’t have to be a mistake. Twitter knows that people who used to work for Twitter now work for Meta. Seems perfectly fine to me.
The next sentence is “With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat Threads app.” This sentence doesn’t follow logically unless it was Meta who had the knowledge in the previous sentence.