Since its official launch on July 6^th, 2023, Meta’s Threads App has caught the whole world’s attention by reaching 10 million users within just 7 hours! It took Spotify 5 months, Instagram 2.5 months, and ChatGPT 5 days.  With Threads reaching 30 million users in less than 24 hours, Twitter threatens to sue Meta for intellectual property rights and accessing Twitter’s trade secrets and highly confidential information.

Today, Meta launched a new platform Threads, A standalone text-based competitor against Twitter. Threads is based on the Instagram account system and is now accessible on all devices. Meta was planning to launch this standalone app long back and with the recent “temporary limits” on reading posts per day, Meta came up with a new platform to strengthen their position in the social media platform market.

 Features of Threads app

• Threads is a text-based application and has much similar functionality to Twitter. It is an Instagram-based application, Threads posts can be up to 500 characters and users can send texts, share photos, and post 5-minute-long videos.

• Since this app has been built on Instagram, users can directly log in with their Instagram account and follow everyone on the list.

• With the options of like, comment, and share for each post, the app has quite a minimalistic interface and homepage of the post feed just like Instagram.

• Users can easily share a thread post to their Instagram story and share any post as a link on any other social platform.

All of your Threads belong to Us!

Since its official launch, Threads has already sparked some privacy controversy. The official listing on the Apple store reveals that this app may collect user data such as location, health & fitness, finance, search history, contacts, browsing history, identifiers, and other sensitive info.

In 2020, Apple introduced a privacy policy in which all app publishers must disclose all the information they collect. Even Twitter collects the same amount of user data as Threads but since the app store is showing the privacy policy of this new launch, it has spread some Threads about user privacy.

How this new Thread could affect the Social Media Industry?

Meta’s Threads is now available in 100 countries including the United States, India, and many others but not in the EU because of regulatory concerns. On Tuesday, Meta platforms lost one of the biggest markets in a legal fight with German data curb order that strikes directly at the heart of the business model.

In one of the recent interviews, the Instagram chief, Adam Mosseri addressed the issue of Threads not being available in the EU, "Complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year" referring to the Digital Markets Act, a set of competition rules for tech giants set by EU.

Meta's decision of holding off the launch of Threads in the EU is an example of how rules and complexities can affect the product launch and its potential market.  Even after a European court ruled against Meta in an Anti-trust and data breach case, the share prices of the social media giant rose more than 2% in a day and with gaining 1 million users just in 2 hours, share prices might go up.

It seems like Meta has big plans for Threads, as the company is working on making this app compatible with ActivityPub. It is a decentralized social networking platform that is part of a new rising movement called “Fediverse.” ActivityPub is a technology through which all social networks can be made interoperable, connecting everything in one social network graph system.  

 Rivals thread up!

 As of July, the market cap of Meta Platform Inc is 754.39 billion USD, much bigger than Twitter’s $41.09 Billion, and with this new launch and upcoming compatibility plans, it seems like Meta is looking to make another remarkable impact in its market cap and on the social media market as well. Meta’s this new app has definitely made all of his rivals go all ears. Threads is joining platforms competing in the microblogging sphere like Bluesky, Spill, Mastodon, and Koo, creating a new challenge for Twitter’s undisputed reign in the microblogging space.