Meta wants to take advantage of the murky water that Twitter is in to fish for millions of followers around the world. Mark Zuckerberg’s company plans to launch the Threads app tomorrow in the United States and Friday in the rest of the world, a network that works, apparently from App Store screenshots ‘Apple – at the moment it will not be available for Android -, in a similar way to that of the platform that Elon Musk has.
In an effort to speed up its adoption, Threads will be getting Instagram follower and follower lists, even though they are separate apps. The purpose of transferring these contacts is that users can join them easily, since they do not have to start from scratch, but with a ready-made base.
Meta’s definition of Threads in the App Store is that its new platform “is the place where communities come together to talk about everything, from the topics that interest you today to what will be trending tomorrow”. “Whatever it is that interests you – he points out – you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and other people who like the same things, or create your own loyal followers to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world”.
Among the little information available about Meta’s app at the moment is its similarity to Twitter (where tweet chains are called threads). You can mark the comments you like, make comments, share and forward each of the posts.
One of the revealed characteristics of Threads is common to other Meta apps: its insatiable demand for personal data. Among other things, after agreeing to its terms, the user will surrender health and fitness information, financial information, contact information, user content, browsing history, usage data, diagnostics, purchases, location, contacts, search history, identifiers and confidential information.
Threads seems to come at an opportune time, when Twitter is at its worst, with difficulties on several fronts and the discontent of a large part of its nearly 350 million users. Over the weekend, Elon Musk ordered a limit on the number of posts that can be seen each day as a measure to curb alleged mass data mining by artificial intelligence companies.
Musk tries to get the public to accept a minimum paid subscription (8 euros per month), but looks to extract performance from other situations. TweetDesk, a Twitter web app intended for advanced and professional users, has been malfunctioning since last week. The issues coincide with yesterday’s announcement that in a month you will need to have a paid Twitter Blue subscription to continue using it.
In the midst of this rivalry, Musk and Zuckerberg challenged each other to a wrestling match in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. The challenge is still valid.
