Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted to supersede Twitter and provide a central place for public conversation online. Yet Twitter remains stubbornly irreconcilable.
That hasn’t stopped Mr. Zuckerberg.
On Monday, his company, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, launched a new app in the realm of Twitter.
The app, which is called Threads and is linked to Instagram, Appeared in Apple’s App Store Users will need to sign up to download it on Thursday, when it is released. The app appears to function much like Twitter, with an emphasis on public interaction, with users being able to follow people they already follow on Instagram.
Mr. Zuckerberg is on strike while Twitter goes through fresh turmoil. Since Elon Musk bought the social platform last year, he has transformed the service by tinkering with Twitter’s algorithm that decides which posts will be most visible, removing content moderation rules that allow certain types of Ban Tweets and eliminate a verification process that verifies users’ identities.
Then over the weekend, Mr Musk put a limit on how many tweets its users would be able to read while using the app. He said the move was in response to other companies taking Twitter’s data in a process called “scraping”. Users of Twitter soon began receiving messages that they had exceeded their “rate limit”, rendering the app effectively unusable after a short period of time viewing posts. Many Twitter users got disappointed.
“If there has ever been a more self-destructive owner of a billion-dollar enterprise who is resentful of the customers who determine the success of that enterprise, I am unaware of it,” says Lou Pascalis, founder and CEO of the marketing company AJL Advisory. Am.” And the ad technology strategy firm, said of Mr. Musk and Twitter.
It appears that the latest turmoil at Twitter has given Mr. Zuckerberg an opportunity for threads.
Meta executives have discussed how to take advantage of the chaos that has been brewing at Twitter since last year, including building a rival service. According to a December report in The New York Times, a Meta employee wrote in an internal post last year, “Twitter is in trouble and Meta needs its mojo back.” “Let’s go for their bread and butter.”
This resulted in Threads, a crash project spun off from Instagram and internally code-named Project 92. According to a photo preview of the app displayed in Apple’s App Store, users will be able to log into Threads using their Instagram account.
Meta executives previously characterized the app as a “sanely run” version of the public-facing social network, a very subtle jab at Mr Musk’s erratic behaviour.
Mr Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the threads quickly gained online attention, with one of Twitter’s founders, Jack Dorsey, Tweet Screenshot of the app’s data policy and mr musk is answering“Yes.”
A Meta spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta is launching Threads in the face of its own challenges. Silicon Valley companies are investing heavily in the move toward the so-called metaverse, an all-encompassing digital world. But the move has been greeted with skepticism, given that the metaverse is far from mainstream.
In recent months, Mr. Zuckerberg has also cut costs at Meta and grappled with questions about whether the company is falling behind in the artificial intelligence race. At a staff meeting last month, he tried to unite workers by explaining the mass layoffs last year and laying out a vision for how Meta’s work in AI would blend with his plans for the Metaverse.
Even with those challenges, Meta remains Twitter’s most credible competitor, with its rich potential and audience of more than three billion people using Facebook, Instagram or its other apps. Other platforms trying to take advantage of Twitter’s weakness — like Tumblr, Nostra, Spill, Mastodon, and BlueSky — are all much smaller than Meta.
“Even though Facebook is in decline, its user base is still huge,” said Mr. Pascalis of AJL Advisory. He added that its large number of users would make it more likely that its copycat apps would “achieve success at the expense of Twitter.”
Facebook and Twitter have been at loggerheads for years over trying to capture every minute of conversation online. In Twitter’s early days, Mr Zuckerberg made an offer to buy the company, but was declined. Prior to the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook made a major effort to showcase its live products and trending topics on political events and television.
Since then, Mr Zuckerberg has focused on efforts such as livestreaming video – an area that Twitter has also embraced – and helping users find trending hashtags on Facebook and Instagram to discover topics that have gone viral.
Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Musk may face off in another way: in the ring.
According to Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship sports franchise, the two men are discussing the possibility of sparring in a mixed martial arts match. Although no date has been set, the tech billionaires have privately told Mr White they are keen to battle each other, and the contours of an event are taking shape.
