Billionaire founder and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg says the newly launched Twitter rival social media app, Threads logged five million sign-ups in its first four hours of operation.

Zuckerberg disclosed that his company sought to attract users from Elon Musk’s troubled platform through an offer of lengthier posts.

According to the Guardian UK, the Facebook and Instagram owner brought forward the app’s debut by 15 hours to 7:00 pm on Wednesday in the United States and Thursday midnight in the United Kingdom.

The inauguration of the app was freely available in 100 countries on the Apple and Google app stores, but regulatory concerns have revealed that it will not be available in the European Union (EU).

Brands such as Billboard, HBO, NPR and Netflix had accounts set up within minutes of launch. Meta said initial celebrity backers included Shakira and Gordon Ramsay, with a recent report suggesting that Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama had also been approached.

Thread users will need an Instagram account to log in. Once they have signed up, they can choose to follow the same accounts they follow on Instagram, if they too have joined the new app.

The app closely resembles Twitter visually, although some of the wording has been changed, with retweets called “reposts” and tweets called “threads”.

Meta has not been averse to copying rival products in the past, including the 2020 launch of Instagram’s Reels feature, noted for its similarity to TikTok’s short-form videos.

Posts on Threads can be 500 characters long, compared with 280 for most Twitter users, and videos of up to five minutes in length can be posted while a post can be shared as a link on other platforms. Users can unfollow, block, restrict or report others. Users can also filter out replies with certain words in them.

In subsequent Threads posts, Zuckerberg addressed those challenges. “I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will,” he wrote.

(CDA NEWS)
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