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Threads: Ten million join Meta's Twitter rival, Zuckerberg says

Tech

1 years ago
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Ten million users signed up for Meta's newly launched Threads app in its first seven hours, the company's chief Mark Zuckerberg says.

He pitched the app as a "friendly" rival to Twitter, which was bought by Elon Musk in October.

Experts say Threads could attract Twitter users unhappy with recent changes to the platform.

Threads allows users to post up to 500 characters, and has many features similar to Twitter.

Earlier, Mr Zuckerberg said keeping the platform "friendly... will ultimately be the key to its success".

But Mr Musk responded: "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."

When asked on Threads whether the app will be "bigger than Twitter", Mr Zuckerberg said: "It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it.

Table showing how Threads and Twitter compare, with Threads allowing posts of 500 characters compared with Twitter's 280, and 5 minute videos compared with 2min 20 secs. Both allow links, photos, and deleting posts but Twitter allows direct messaging, shows trending stories, and uses hashtags which Threads doesn't. Threads has verification but it is one of the services that you have to pay to access on Twitter, along with longer posts and videos and an editing function.

source: BBC