Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted to replace Twitter as the main place where people talk online in public. Still, Twitter has refused to be replaced.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced a new app on Monday that will compete with Twitter.
The app, which is called Threads and is linked to Instagram, showed up in Apple’s App Store so that people could sign up to download it on Thursday, when it will be launched. The app seems to work a lot like Twitter in that it focuses on public conversations and lets Instagram users follow people they already follow there.
Mark Zuckerberg is striking while Twitter undergoes fresh chaos. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, he has changed the service by tinkering with the algorithm that decides which posts are most visible, getting rid of rules that ban certain types of tweets, and changing the way that users’ identities are confirmed.
Then, over the weekend, Elon Musk put limits on how many tweets the app’s users could read at once. He said that the move was made because other companies were taking Twitter’s data through a method called “scraping.” Users of Twitter soon got messages telling them they had reached their “rate limit,” which made the app useless after just a short time of reading posts. A lot of Twitter users got angry.
Mark Zuckerberg may have seen an opportunity for Threads in the new trouble at Twitter.
Since last year, Meta’s leaders have talked about how to take advantage of the chaos at Twitter, such as by building a similar service.
This has led to Threads, a crash project that grew out of Instagram and was called Project 92 inside the company. Apple’s App Store has screenshots of the Threads app that show that users will be able to sign in with their Instagram account.
In the past, execs at Meta called the app a “sanely run” version of a social network for the public, which was a not-so-subtle jab at Musk’s strange behavior.
Musk and Twitter didn’t answer right away when asked for a response. But Threads got a lot of attention online quickly. One of the people who started Twitter, Jack Dorsey, tweeted a picture of the app’s data policy.
Meta is putting out Threads even though it has its own problems. The Silicon Valley company has been spending a lot of money to move toward the so-called “metaverse,” which is a digital world that makes you feel like you are there. But the move has been met with skepticism because the metaverse is not something that most people do.
Mark Zuckerberg has also cut costs at Meta and thought about whether the company is falling behind in the race for artificial intelligence in the past few months. In a meeting with employees last month, he tried to rally them by talking about the mass cuts from last year and showing how Meta’s work in artificial intelligence would fit in with its plans for the metaverse.
Even with these problems, Meta is still the most legitimate rival to Twitter. It has a lot of money and more than three billion people who use Facebook, Instagram, or one of its other apps.
Facebook and Twitter have been fighting for years over who can get the most up-to-date internet conversation. In the early days of Twitter, Zuckerberg tried to buy the company but was turned down. Before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook also put a lot of effort into getting its live products and popular topics shown on TV and at political events.
Since then, Meta has worked on things like livestreaming video, which is also something that Twitter is working on, and trending hashtags so that users can learn more about things that are popular on Facebook and Instagram.
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