Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg: Instagram unveils Threads app, a potential rival to Twitter
Threads, a new application explicitly developed to directly compete with Twitter. This launch poses the most significant challenge to Elon Musk's ailing social media platform to date.
As reported by Bloomberg, Threads, the newly unveiled app by Instagram, offers users the ability to share text, links, and engage in conversations by replying to or reposting messages from fellow users. Notably, the app enables users to seamlessly transfer their existing follower lists and account names from Instagram, Meta's popular photo and video-sharing platform with a user base exceeding 2 billion, which includes renowned brands, celebrities, and content creators.
“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it," Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a post on Threads. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it.
Hopefully we will." Many of Instagram’s influential users have been asking the company to make a text-based app, according to Connor Hayes, a vice president of product. “Creators were telling us, ‘We want an alternative to what’s out there, and we don’t want to start over and have to build out a following from zero,’" Hayes said in an interview, without mentioning Twitter specifically.
Meta-owned platforms Instagram and Facebook have gained a reputation for their track record of emulating products from emerging internet competitors, which has proven to be remarkably successful. Notably, Instagram's Reels feature was developed as a direct rival to the popular viral video app TikTok, while its Stories feature was introduced following the rise of Snap Inc.'s Snapchat, which offers disappearing posts. Meta's previous apps have indirectly competed with
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