Meta's Instagram on Wednesday officially launched Threads, an app designed as a direct rival to Twitter and most serious threat yet to Elon Musk owned social-media site.
Threads is a new app enabling text, link sharing, and interaction through replies and reposts. Users can migrate their Instagram follower lists and account names, benefiting from the app's features
“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it,” Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a post on Threads. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Adding to it Connor Hayes, a vice president of product, said that many of Instagram’s influential users have been asking the company to make a text-based app.
“Creators were telling us, ‘We want an alternative to what’s out there, and we don’t want to start over and have to build out a following from zero,’” Hayes said in an interview.
Users are mostly happy with the new app.
One said, I love this thread App. So sweet interface. Be like I will concentrate more there. Elon has seen a very good competitor.
The hardest thing for Thread is cold-starting a network, but anyone who worked at Twitter should be quietly embarrassed by how much nicer the thread app is. That’s also why so many of us used third-party Twitter apps, said another user
‘Zuckerberg thread app is lit,’ user commented
Had a moment where I was scrolling through Threads and forgot that I wasn’t on Twitter, in the same way that I sometimes find myself accidentally on YouTube Shorts or Reels instead of TikTok and I’m like “oops!” Not sure if this is good or bad for either the thread or bird app.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has a track record of emulating successful internet competitors. Instagram's Reels mimicked TikTok's viral video app, and Stories imitated Snapchat's disappearing posts. Meta has indirectly competed with Twitter by attracting high-profile users. However, the release of Threads marks Meta's first foray into directly replicating Twitter's look and feel.
The timing seems propitious for Meta. Since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October, the company has cut thousands of employees, loosened its content moderation policies and put users and advertisers through a spate of technical challenges. Twitter is hurting financially, too. Advertising revenue at the San Francisco-based company has declined by 50%, Musk said in March, and he recently hired Linda Yaccarino, a NBCUniversal executive, as chief executive officer to try to improve relationships with brands.
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