2023-07-07 12:54:42
“Threads” … Zuckerberg strangles “Twitter” with his “threads”
Just two hours after launching Threads (Threads in Arabic), on Wednesday evening, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his latest creation had been downloaded two million times. This was just the beginning. Two more hours later, 5 million people had downloaded Threads. By the time Zuckerberg went to bed, the number had reached 10 million. When he woke up Thursday morning (local time), 30 million people had downloaded Threads. And that in less than 24 hours.
Thus, in less than one day, Threads, which poses the biggest challenge to Twitter, has become the fastest-loading platform in history. It easily bypassed ChatGBT, which had 1 million downloads in its first five days, according to the company that developed it, OpenAI. Like this, Threads will pass 100 million users within two months, a feat that only ChatGPT has surpassed, according to analytics firm Lycopp.
Threads now includes the active accounts of celebrities such as Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Jackman, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, as well as media outlets such as The Washington Post, Archyde.com and The Economist, and platforms such as The Hollywood Reporter and Vice. and “Netflix”.
The fastest downloading platform in history with 30 million users in less than a day
“Let’s get started now. Welcome to Threads,” Zuckerberg wrote in his first post on the new app, and in a few minutes he had thousands of likes. And he added, Thursday, just after 15:00 GMT: “Wow. 30 million accounts created as of this morning. It seems to be the beginning of something special.” And before that, he had responded through his account to a number of users, and for the first time in more than ten years he sent a message via “Twitter” showing the “Spider-Man” character.
This rush to “Threads” reflected the desire to find an alternative to “Twitter”, which for the past 17 years has been a central space for public conversations via the Internet. Since the American billionaire Elon Musk bought this platform, for $ 44 billion, last October, he made many changes, which angered users, especially converting account verification to a paid service or dismissing the majority of employees in the field of content control. And Musk had announced, last Saturday, the imposition of a cap on the number of messages that can be viewed per day in each account, officially on a temporary basis, a measure that was not well received by users, advertisers, and developers as well. Last Monday, Twitter announced that the TweetDeck service will only be available to verified and paid accounts.
“The timing is very good for Meta,” said Jonathan Taplin, author of two books on giant technology companies, stressing that Threads pose an existential threat to Twitter, according to AFP.
Indeed, Twitter quickly sensed this threat, as it threatened to sue Meta for its new Threads platform, in a letter sent to Zuckerberg by its lawyer, Alex Spiro. Semaphore news site reported that Spiro accused Meta in his letter of hiring former employees of the company who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other top-secret information.” “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and requests Metta to take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other top secret information,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
“Nobody on Threads’ engineering team was a former Twitter employee,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded in a post on Threads. A former senior Twitter employee also told Archyde.com that he was not aware of any previous Threads employment.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk wrote, in response to a tweet that reported the news: “It’s okay to compete, but cheating is not okay.” Twitter founder Jack Dorsey also criticized the launch of Threads, tweeting Thursday: “We wanted flying cars, and instead we got 7 copies of Twitter.”
With more than two billion active users, Instagram provides the new service with a launch pad that other Twitter competitors have not.
Meta owns both Instagram and Facebook. The user interface of Threads is similar to the micro-blogging platform Twitter. But “Threads” does not support searches using keywords, nor sending direct private messages. “Meta” does not hide its intention to rely on other products of its own, so that its latest applications will grow rapidly, confirming from the outset that “Threads” is derived from “Instagram”. Pinar Yildirim, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that the Instagram platform “is a meta product that achieves the greatest success. They were not able to connect this new product with Facebook, because this name is no longer pushing the dream.” With more than two billion active users, Instagram provides the new service with a launching pad that was not available to other Twitter competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon, through to very conservative favorites such as TruthSocial, Parler and Gitter. and “missed”. And “Threads” allows “Instagram” users to confirm entry through the passwords they use, to publish content on the new platform.
Analyst Brian Visser wrote: “The equation is simple: if an older Instagram user with a large number of followers, such as Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, and Lionel Messi, posts content on Threads regularly, this new platform may develop rapidly, and I suspect that budgets will follow soon.” short”. This possibility could add to the pressure on Twitter, whose revenue has declined since Musk bought it.
Intellectual property law experts said Twitter needed far more detail than what was contained in the letter to file a trade secret theft lawsuit against Meta. “The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (who were laid off or pushed out by the company itself) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site likely wouldn’t support a trade secrets lawsuit,” Stanford law professor Mark Lemley explained to Archyde.com. .
This early momentum may not translate into long-term success. Twitter still leads the way, with more than 237 million daily users, according to the most recent public figures the company cited last year. Meanwhile, pressure continues on Meta from regulators and officials around the world, specifically over its privacy policies, as well as how it tackles fake news and disinformation across its platforms.
“It’s still too early to appreciate[the success of Threads]because we’re not sure if users will stay and interact a lot, or if they’ll come back to Twitter,” Ali Mughrabi, senior equity analyst at Morningstar Research Services, told the Wall Street Journal.
In the same context, Igor Teshin, an IT analyst at Harding Lovner Asset Management, who owns shares in Meta, pointed out that it is still not clear to what extent Threads will affect Meta’s revenue. But he added, speaking to the “Wall Street Journal”: “Regardless, this is not good news for Twitter.” Some analysts have said that Threads could eventually increase Meta’s revenue by a few billion dollars, but it is unlikely to make a material contribution in the near term.
Regulatory concerns will delay the launch of Threads in the European Union
Meta’s revenues last year exceeded $116 billion. And “Twitter” revealed that its revenues for 2021 amounted to 5 billion dollars, while Musk indicated a sharp decline in its value, last year.
In addition, a source close to “Meta” told AFP that regulatory concerns would delay the launch of the application in European Union countries, as the company is subject to the new digital markets law that imposes strict rules on major Internet companies. One such rule restricts the transfer of personal data between different products, as would be the case between Instagram and Threads. Zuckerberg was previously caught by European regulators and is doing so when he bought WhatsApp.
1688741643
#Threads #Zuckerberg #strangles #Twitter #threads