Short Message App
“Threads”: Facebook mother Meta launches Twitter rivals
Watch the video: Meta competes with Twitter with “threads”.
The new short message service “Threads” from Facebook’s mother Meta was launched on Thursday night. The application has been activated in the USA and in many other countries. Threads will initially not be available in Germany and the other EU countries. The group refers to regulatory issues that are still open. The merging of data from different services could be legally problematic in the EU. Threads is connected to the Instagram app and can thus draw on existing connections between users. Instagram users do not need separate access for the text-based service. Therefore, the short message service is considered the most promising Twitter competitor on the market. Since the takeover by Elon Musk in autumn 2022, Twitter has not calmed down. The billionaire repeatedly alienates users and advertisers with his decisions. Most recently, the decision to limit the number of messages read per day on Twitter caused an uproar. In addition, the “TweetDeck” is subject to a fee.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, criticism of the short message service has been growing. Now the Facebook group Meta is trying to make a profit from it and is starting threads.
“Let’s go. Welcome to Threads”: With these words from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook parent company Meta has launched its new short message app Threads. On Wednesday (local time) Threads was released in the app stores for iPhones and Android smartphones. However, the launch in Europe has been delayed due to the pending approval from Brussels.
The new app is an offshoot of Instagram, another Meta subsidiary. It can benefit from their more than two billion users and therefore does not have to start from scratch. At launch, she already boasted active accounts from stars like Shakira and media outlets like Hollywood Reporter and Netflix. Threads should run without ads for the time being.
Threads start successfully
Obviously, many people had been waiting for the new app: Four hours after the launch, Zuckerberg already reported “more than five million registrations” on his official Threads account.
Meta hopes to become the new favorite communication channel for celebrities, politicians and businesses, and to cash in on the chaos created by Twitter owner Elon Musk at the messaging service.
Meta announced in mid-March that it was working on a new social network, the description of which was reminiscent of a potential competitor to Twitter. “We are considering a decentralized, independent social network that enables the exchange of written messages in real time,” the group said at the time.
Elon Musk is changing Twitter
Musk had caused a stir in the past few days with the decision to limit the number of tweets that non-paying Twitter users can read each day. In addition, tweets are now no longer visible to Internet users who are not logged into Twitter.
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On Monday, Twitter also announced that in future the use of the Tweetdeck application would be reserved exclusively for its paying users. Tweetdeck provides an interface for clearly organizing tweets. The application, which is used in particular by journalists and scientists, no longer worked reliably due to the restrictions introduced at the weekend.