India Today
What is Threads?
Threads is a new app from the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The platform looks a lot like Twitter, with a feed of largely text-based posts although users can also post photos and videos where people can have real-time conversations.
Meta said messages posted to Threads will have a 500-character limit. Similar to Twitter, users can reply to, repost and quote others’ Threads posts. But the app also blends Instagram’s existing aesthetic and navigation system, and offers the ability to share posts from Threads directly to Instagram Stories.
.Thread accounts can also be listed as public or private. Verified Instagram accounts are automatically verified on Threads.
“The vision for Threads is to create an option and friendly public space for conversation,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Threads post following the launch. “We hope to take what Instagram does best and create a new experience around text, ideas, and discussing what’s on your mind.”
Facebook-parent Meta officially launched its Twitter competitor on Wednesday , Threads, after first confirming its plans for the app just three months ago.
Threads is already get strong start: the app received 30 million sign-ups as of Thursday morning, according to the company, including a large number of brands, celebrities, journalists and many other prominent accounts.
Users sign up through their Instagram accounts and keep the same username, password and account name, although they can edit their bio to be unique to Threads. Users can also import the list of accounts they follow directly from Instagram, making it super easy to get up and running on the app.
But it’s not quite so easy to leave Threads. While users can temporarily deactivate their profiles via the settings section on the app, the company says in its privacy policy that “your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
Some users have also raised concerns about the amount of data that the Threads, like Instagram, can collect about users, including location, contacts, search history, browsing history, contact info and more, according to the Apple App Store.
Threads is just the latest platform launched in recent months in hopes of unseating Twitter as the go-to app for real-time, public conversations. But it may have the greatest chance at success.
Many Twitter users have expressed desire for an alternative since Musk took over the platform late last year. Frequent technical issues and policy changes have sent some noteworthy Twitter users heading for the exits.
Meta has at least one significant leg up on Twitter: the size of its existing user base. Meta is hoping to capture at least some of its more than 2 billion global active Instagram users with the new app. That’s compared to Twitter’s active user base, which is somewhere around 250 million.
“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post. “Twitter has had the pportunity do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
In a tweet on Thursday, Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared to acknowledge the rival app’s launch, calling Twitter “irreplaceable.”
“We’re often imitated but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” she said
Meta’s existing scale and infrastructure could play to its advantage. Whereas many of the other Twitter competitors rolled out in recent months have required users to join waitlists or receive invitations to sign up, only to have to work to recreate their network on the new site, Threads makes it remarkably easy for users to get started.
Source: CNN