Zuckerberg Launches Twitter Rival App, Threads

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram has launched a new app called Threads, which could be a rival to popular microblogging app, Twitter.

This was announced in an Instagram post on Thursday by Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg who described the new app as an open, friendly space for conversation.

“Big news everyone, we are launching Threads. An open and friendly public space for conversation. It takes the best parts of the Instagram experience and creates a whole new app around text, ideas, and sharing what’s on your mind.

“You just sign up with your Instagram account, you have your followers already there and you could just get started. It is available on the AppStore now”, he said.

Instagram Head, Adam Mosseri, said in an interview earlier this week that although Twitter pioneered the microblogging space, its current unpredictable and volatile nature under CEO Elon Musk provided an opening for competition.

“Obviously Twitter pioneered the space. And there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram,” he said.

The release of Threads comes days after Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, announced the controversial decision to limit the number of tweets that users can view per day.

The decision was met with heavy backlash from Twitter users, many of whom flocked to Donald Trump’s Truth Social to create accounts there.

The new app has a very similar layout to Twitter, with many of the same major features.

Posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long and include links, pictures, and videos of up to five minutes.

One of the major advantages that Threads has is that it leverages Instagram’s massive user base. So if you have an Instagram account, you can join Threads with the same username and all the same information used there, making the process very seamless for interested users. Followers from your Instagram account are also carried onto Threads.