Ten million users have signed up for Meta’s newly launched Threads app in its first seven hours.
Confirming this on Thursday, the company’s chief Mark Zuckerberg says he pitched the app as a friendly rival to Twitter, which was bought by Elon Musk in October 2022, noting that keeping the platform friendly will ultimately be the key to its success.
Responding to whether the app will be bigger than Twitter , Mr Zuckerberg explained that it’ll take some time, but It’s meant to be a public conversations app with over 1 billion people on it, adding that Twitter has had the opportunity to do it but hasn’t nailed it, hence the reason for taking the challenge.
However, experts have posited that the threads could attract Twitter users unhappy with recent changes to the platform, while competitors have criticised the amount of data the app might use, which may include health, financial, and browsing data linked to users’ identities.
Meanwhile, Threads allows users to post up to 500 characters, has many features similar to Twitter, and is now available to download in over 100 countries including the UK, but not yet in the EU because of regulatory concerns.
Relatedly, Twitter boss Elon Musk, last weekend, restricted the number of tweets users could see on his platform per day, citing extreme “data scraping, which may have resulted into the investion of thread by Zuckerberg.
Since Mr Musk took over Twitter, many users of Twitter have publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with the platform and his stewardship – citing erratic behaviour and political views.
Credit: BBC
