The owner of Facebook and Instagram is set to launch a new “conversation app” called Threads on Thursday that is expected to compete directly with Twitter.
The launch comes after a chaotic weekend in which Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced a limit on the number of tweets users can see in a day.
A newly launched website shows a countdown to Thursday’s release, and a listing on Apple’s App Store describes Threads as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app.”
“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’s trending tomorrow,” the app listing read.
“Whatever you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things, or build a loyal following to share your ideas, opinions, and creativity with the world.”
The screenshot images show a text-based platform apparently similar to Twitter. The images also suggest that users will be able to keep their Instagram username on the app. iPhone users will need to install iOS 14 or later to use it.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted an image of the data Threads will require users to share, to which Musk simply replied: “Yeah.”
Twitter users are dismayed by tweet display limits. On Saturday, Musk said that unverified users could only read 600 tweets a day, which he later revised up to 1,000.
Verified users, who have paid up to $11 per month to access Twitter Blue’s subscription service, can view up to 10,000 posts per day.
Musk said the move was to discourage “extreme levels of data mining,” the automated collection of large amounts of data.
Twitter now charge up to $5,000 per month for startups and at least $42,000 per month for enterprises and scaled commercial projects to access its API, which allows developers to build products using tweets and was previously free.
Next month, Twitter will also build Tweetdeck, a web app with advanced search and posting features, available only to Twitter Blue subscribers. Users must purchase a subscription within 30 days to continue using it.
Tweetdeck was created by a London-based entrepreneur using the open API, before Twitter bought the service in 2011 for an estimated $40 million.
The choice of name for Meta’s new app is a significant nod to its main rival. A thread, or linked series of tweets, has become one of the key features of Twitter ever since it was introduced as an official feature in 2017.
Other potential rivals to Twitter have driven users away from the platform following the Musk acquisition, including Mastodon and BlueSky, though they have yet to challenge Twitter’s primacy.
Since its launch in 2006 as one of several “microblogging” services in the social networking explosion of the Web 2.0 era, Twitter has become a standard part of daily life for many.
Governments, businesses, sports teams, think tanks, journalists, and many other organizations use Twitter to communicate with the public, giving it great importance globally, even though its daily users are far fewer than those of Instagram and Facebook.
