Most people know Will Wright as the man who created popular games like "Sim City," "The Sims," and "Spore," but his latest project isn't a game at all, it's an app.
"I find that I'm spending far more time on my phone than I do on my PC, game consoles — all that put together," Wright told Business Insider. "My phone is how I'm consuming most of my content, but a lot of the content I've noticed wasn't really designed for it."
That's why Wright created Thred, his first standalone app, which is basically a social media feed designed to be whatever people want it to be, and it includes enough in-app tools and customization options to be flexible enough to support that vision.
"With the games I was doing, I got very interested in creative communities and giving players tools for making stuff and sharing it — 'Spore' had a certain take on it, 'Sims' had a different take," Wright said. "'Sims' also had very rich storytelling, where people would use these little dolls and sets to tell these elaborate stories and share them and you'd get hundreds of thousands of stories — people did whole novels in there. I started thinking about how we can give people more creative content creation, and a lot of it comes down to there really isn't any existing content format that I feel like was designed for the mobile phone, you know the one-handed interstitial, standing in line at Starbucks kind of thing."
Thred is meant to be that platform, and it's designed for one-handed use, with a vertical news feed where each post can be browsed horizontally with the flick of a thumb thanks to its carousel formatting.
"Basically we ended up with this multi-panel format, almost a visual language," Wright said. "I can browse stuff very rapidly, or dive in if I see something I like. These can be stories, they can be top ten lists, they can be curated things, memes, whatever you want. We tried to come up with something that's very simple to understand and create, yet has a wide range of possibilities of what you do with it."
Thred also has a deep emphasis on linking, allowing you tag and link to other people, posts, hashtags, and places, which makes it easy to continue browsing and follow threads into a rabbit hole of sorts. It also gives people the ability to customize the browsing experience, and could even allow for choose-your-own-adventure style storytelling.
You can click everything, and it takes you somewhere, and that's potentially the most powerful and unique aspect of Thred.
Aside from the standard social media features like comments, bookmarking, and liking posts, Thred's creation tools have a surprising amount of depth to them. Wright says the team wanted to allow people to design whatever they wanted without even leaving the app, and the result is a host of photo editing tools, collections of stickers and images, and the ability to quickly bring in your own photos or search the web for content from directly within Thred.
You can also jumpstart a post by quickly sharing where you are, or simply pulling in your latest photo.
Wright's vision for Thred is undoubtedly grand. And while he's certainly going to face an uphill battle convincing people to dive into yet another social media app, he also knows from his past games that sometimes the most interesting use cases evolve out of giving people the tools they need and then getting out of the way.
With a sterling track record and a clear focus on a slick and user-friendly format and design, Wright might just be able to convince people to start posting and testing what Thred can really do.
You can download Thred over at the App Store.
