While Elon Musk alienates users, advertisers and developers with the limitation of his tweets, his competitors are advancing their pawns. Meta Group’s new application, which aims to compete head-on with Twitter, is now available on mobile app stores for iPhone and Android for free pre-order.
“Threads, an Instagram app”, the new application, whose name means “thread” in English, should be available in the coming days, and is described on the Apple store, the App Store, as “the application of Instagram for conversations via text”.
Discuss everything
“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about to what’s trending tomorrow,” reads the app’s description on the app stores.
It must allow you to “connect directly with your favorite creators and those who like the same or to build your own base in order to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the whole world”.
Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced in mid-March that it was working on a new social network whose description made it a potential competitor to Twitter.
“We are thinking about a decentralized and independent social network allowing the sharing of written messages in real time,” the group said in a statement sent to AFP.
Interoperable with other social networks
According to the Platformer site, the application would be designed to be interoperable with other networks of the same type, which would be a major break with the strategy hitherto employed by tech giants who have always preferred closed environments with their own rules of use.
The choice of interoperability envisaged by Meta also stands out from Twitter’s approach to the matter: in December, its main shareholder Elon Musk had briefly blocked the accounts of several users who shared links to other social networks, including Facebook, Instagram or Mastodon.
Twitter has again caused strong reactions in recent days by choosing to restrict the reading of tweets, to 6,000 per day for verified accounts, 600 for others and even 300 for new accounts, ceilings which should be quickly raised.
The stated objective of the decision is to limit the massive use of social network data by third parties, in particular companies, thus feeding their artificial intelligence models.