Zuckerberg’s Twitter competition
Meta unlocks short message service threads
7/6/2023 3:03 am
The timing is promising: While Elon Musk pissed off Twitter users with a new reading limit, Facebook parent Meta is bringing its new short message service to the app stores. But Threads has another starting advantage.
The Facebook group Meta has launched its Twitter competitor called Threads. The application went live in the US and dozens of other countries during the night. The app will initially not be available in Germany and the other EU countries – the group refers to regulatory issues that are still open.
Threads is tied to Meta’s popular photo and video app, Instagram, and is seen as the potentially most promising alternative to Twitter. The reason is a head start: Meta can use existing connections between hundreds of millions of users for its Twitter copy right from the start. If you have an Instagram account, you can also use that account to log into Threads. With other Twitter competitors such as Bluesky, Mastodon and T2, such links have to be created from scratch. In the EU, however, the merging of data from different services could be a problem, which is why the app is not yet published here.
Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022. The tech billionaire has so far failed with his plan to put the platform fully at the service of freedom of expression and to make a profit at the same time. The company wasn’t profitable before the takeover, but advertising revenue plummeted afterward. Most recently, Musk introduced limits on how many tweets users can see each day. According to him, this is intended to prevent Twitter data from being sucked off, among other things, for training software with artificial intelligence. Subscribers to Twitter can only see up to 10,000 tweets per day and non-subscribers up to 1,000.