Mark Zuckerberg, two hours after pushing the launch button on Instagram’s new app for real-time public conversations, Threads, on Wednesday. Posted More than 2 million people have downloaded his latest work.
It was just the beginning.
Two more hours later 5 million people I was downloading threads. By the time Meta CEO Zuckerberg went to bed Wednesday night, downloads had soared to 10 million. When he woke up Thursday morning, the app had been downloaded more than 30 million times.
In less than a day, Threads, which was developed as a Twitter rival, seems to have taken over as the fastest-downloaded app of all time. According to OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, it easily outperformed ChatGPT, a chatbot, and was downloaded 1 million times in the first five days.and is on pace to exceed ChatGPT has 100 million users It’s the fastest ever to hit that number in less than two months, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb.
Some of Twitter’s most followed users, including Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Shakira, and Oprah Winfrey, quickly joined Threads and started posting. The atmosphere was celebratory, with users writing welcome messages and expressing their enthusiasm to read each other’s posts. At some point, the new app was so inundated with users that it seemed shaky.
“This is as good a start as we could have hoped for!” Zuckerberg, who owns Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp, said in a thread post on Thursday. He later added, “I feel like something special is about to start.”
The early momentum underscored people’s desire to find an alternative to Twitter, the digital town square founded 18 years ago, which has long been the central place for public conversation online. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, the billionaire has introduced changes that anger longtime users of the social platform, especially those who don’t mind his laissez-faire approach to content management. bottom. Twitter has also been hit with more outages and bugs.
Mr. Musk does not take Mr. Zuckerberg’s actions with a grain of salt. On Thursday, Twitter lawyers sent a letter to Meta, threatening to sue them for using trade secrets to build threads, and the social network to store internal documents related to the dispute between the two companies. asked to do.the letter is previously reported By Semaphore. A spokeswoman for Meta declined to comment.
Threads has come under scrutiny for spreading misinformation and other harmful content on the internet, and was an unexpected hit for Meta, who desperately needed a win. Zuckerberg’s social network was lauded in its early days, but in recent years has been criticized by regulators, activists and users angry at the company’s handling of data and products. Meta also faces questions about the transition to the still emerging immersive digital world, the so-called Metaverse.
But this week has been at least a brief reprieve for Zuckerberg and his company. Employees at Meta celebrated the launch of the thread Wednesday night, sharing internal jokes and memes with each other, according to screenshots of the conversation seen by The New York Times.
Over the past few days, celebrities, brands and influencers have been given early access to the app, a move by Meta to kick off a freewheeling culture of fun and discussion. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in an interview Wednesday that he wanted Threads to be a “friendly place” for public conversation.
Actress Jennifer Lopez added a musical note emoji and said in a post on the thread, “I’m running out of threads.” “Welcome to gay Twitter!” DeGeneres wrote in her thread’s first post.
But that early momentum doesn’t necessarily translate into long-term engagement and success. Twitter has more than 250 million daily users, according to the latest public figures cited by the company last year. Also, the issue that if you want to delete your Threads account, you may need to delete the connected Instagram account has made some Threads users hesitant. Instagram said it is looking into alternative ways Threads users can deactivate their accounts.
This is a story in development and will be updated.
