MENLO PARK (dpa-AFX) – Elon Musk’s Twitter will soon meet its potentially most dangerous challenger: The eagerly awaited Twitter competitor of the Facebook group Meta (Meta Platforms (ex Facebook)) will be launched in a few days. The application called Threads was announced for Thursday in Apple’s US App Store.
Meanwhile, Twitter, which is in crisis under Musk as the owner, is in new turbulence and is trying to convert users of its Tweetdeck app into paying subscription customers. Tweetdeck, which is used primarily by professional Twitter users such as journalists, is getting a new version that will be subject to a charge after 30 days, as the service announced on Monday.
While there are several smaller Twitter competitors, Mark Zuckerberg’s meta is considered a particularly strong rival. The group knows how to operate large online platforms and, unlike Twitter, has no money problems.
A starting advantage could also be the basis of more than a billion users who are already linked: The Threads app is connected to Meta’s popular photo and video app Instagram. With other Twitter rivals such as Mastodon, Bluesky and T2, such user networks that have grown over the years have to be re-established.
This sets the course for a business duel between Musk and Zuckerberg, after the two tech billionaires had already agreed to an exhibition match in the ring in June. The “New York Times” reported at the weekend that such a fight is actually being prepared – but it is still unclear whether it will actually take place. Zuckerberg, 39, trains with martial arts trainers and is visibly fitter than Musk, 52.
The Facebook group has repeatedly copied services and functions from rivals, but has had a mixed record. With the Stories format invented by the photo app Snap, in which users can show pictures and videos to friends for a day, this worked overwhelmingly. The short videos called “Reels”, with which Instagram and Facebook copy the popular Tiktok app, are also growing. On the other hand, despite several attempts, the group never succeeded in establishing a competitor to Snapchat’s self-deleting videos.
Musk imposed tweet viewing restrictions on Twitter in an unprecedented move over the weekend. According to this, paying subscription customers should be able to read up to 10,000 tweets per day and users without a subscription up to 1,000 posts. Musk explained the move by saying that there were too many attempts to skim large amounts of data from Twitter.
The announcement was followed by problems at Tweetdeck, where, among other things, the display of lists was disrupted. Recently, tweets could only be displayed without advertising and with automatic updates via Tweetdeck. It has been speculated for years that the frequent user software could become chargeable – long before Musk took over the billions in autumn 2022.
The technology blog “The Verge” provided an explanation for the latest problems with Tweetdeck, citing software developers: Twitter has cut interfaces through which the program previously accessed the platform./so/DP/ngu
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