Meta’s response to Twitter, a new app called Threads, will go live on Thursday, July 6, just after Elon Musk announced a temporary restriction to the number of views each category of Twitter users can view per day.
The Threads app, which is linked to Instagram, appeared in the Apple app store on Tuesday, July 4, ahead of Thursday’s launch. Meta has launched a countdown website for the release.
The promotional text says Threads will be a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow.
“Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favourite creators and others who love the same things – or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”
From screenshots seen on social media, users will only need their Instagram handle to log in to Threads and follow their existing contacts. As predicted, the app is a copycat of Twitter, especially because it has similar features including reposting, liking and allowing users to limit who can reply to posts.
Meta describes Threads as a “text based conversation app”.
The move is the latest in a rivalry between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Elon Musk.
Musk has already responded to the announcement of the release of Threads saying: “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run.”
It appears from Meta’s Threads app that it will be a free service – and there will be no restrictions on how many posts a user can see – two reasons users are running from Twitter.
Interestingly, Meta has the resources to compete with Twitter. And, because Threads will be part of the Instagram platform, it will also be connected to hundreds of millions of accounts – an audience of more than three billion people who use Facebook, Instagram or its other apps. It’s not starting from zero, as other would-be rivals like Truth Social, Bluesky and Mastodon have had to do.
The Verge reports a companywide meeting in June where Meta executives shared that Instagram Threads will integrate with the decentralised social media protocol used by Mastodon, called ActivityPub. That’s also the meeting where an executive said, “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run.”
However, knowing Meta’s history, Threads will also scoop up enough data on your phone, including location data, purchases and browsing history.
Zuckerberg has a history of copying ideas and making them work
You’d remember Meta’s Reels which is widely seen as a TikTok copy, while Stories looks similar to Snapchat.
According to NYT, Meta’s executives discussed how to capitalise on the chaos at Twitter since last year, including by building a rival service.
“Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” one Meta employee wrote in an internal post last year, according to a report in December by The New York Times. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”
Threads has been under development at Meta since early January under the code name, “Project 92.”
What’s happening at Twitter?
The tweet view count in response to data scraping.
Musk tweeted that “almost every company doing AI” was taking “vast amounts of data” from Twitter, which Musk said was forcing the company to deploy more servers – at a cost – to cope with the demand.
Generative AI tools such as chatbots and image generation services are based on large language models (LLM), which are “trained” on vast amounts of data taken from internet sites including Wikipedia, Twitter and Reddit.
Twitter has also blocked unregistered users from seeing tweets and also rolling out major changes to TweetDeck – TweetDeck is scheduled to become a paid feature.
Some users believe the view limitation move is an attempt to encourage Twitter Blue subscriptions – where users can view 10,000 tweets daily.
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