As many Threads users are aware, in July 2023, Meta Inc (owners of Facebook) released their own service called Threads in the UK and USA. This has caused much confusion but hopefully this blog should clarify the situation.
JPY Ltd registered the trademark “Threads” in 2012 and in 2018 formed Threads Software Ltd to commercialise the Threads service. Over the last 10 years, we have made a large investment in the Threads name and we did not want to potentially have to write-off this investment simply because Meta happened to like the name we had already coined for a messaging service.
Our Threads Intelligent Message Hub currently has an enormous technological lead on any similar service currently available. The exponential growth in AI has met all our predictions and more. Threads was designed with AI in mind and one of the reasons we call it an intelligent message hub. For us to change the service name simply to avoid confusion with Meta’s product could well set back the service enough for us to lose that technological lead.
You can read our press release here.
Threads trademark registration
UK 00002613458, 9 March 2012
Patents
- UK Patent Application No. 1408302.6, (2015)
- International (PCT) Patent Application No. PCT/GB2015/050580 (2015)
- European Patent 15,709,729.6 (2019)
- US Patent 10,733,981 (2020)
Academic papers
- Yardley. J, Hunter, G, et al,: ‘Untangling your Threads – a novel cloud computing application’, IET Reference Article 1st published in March 2016 doi: 10.1049/etr.2015.0053 ISSN 2056-4007 www.ietdl.org
- Hunter, G., Denholm-Price, J., Yardley, J., et al.: ‘The contribution of automatic speech recognition for keywords to assist in the integrated organisation of digital messages’, Proc. Inst. Acoust., 2015, 37, (2), pp. 260–267
- Hunter, G., Denholm-Price, J., Yardley, J., et al.: ‘Keeping your Threads Untangled’, IEEE 2015 International Conference on Intelligent Environments’ 978-1-4673-6654-0/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IE.2015.35
- Hunter, G., Denholm-Price, J., Yardley, J., et al.: ‘Progress Towards a Smarter Office via a Novel Intelligent System for Message Organisation by Unifying E-Mails & Phone Calls’, IEICIN 2015