After more than a decade, Mark Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in a playful jab at Elon Musk on the day the Meta Platforms Inc founder rolled out a much-anticipated Twitter substitute ‘Threads app’.
Meta's Instagram on Wednesday officially unveiled Threads which is considered the most potent threat to the struggling social media service Elon Musk owns. Zuckerberg’s tweet was his first since 2012 and comes days after Musk challenged the Meta founder to a cage fight.
Hours after the ‘Threads launch’, Zuckerberg shared a photo of identical Spider-Men facing off in a tweet. Take a look at the image below,
Threads, the newly unveiled app by Instagram, offers users the ability to share text, and links, and engage in conversations by replying to or reposting messages from fellow users.
Notably, the app enables users to seamlessly transfer their existing follower lists and account names from Instagram, Meta's popular photo and video-sharing platform with a user base exceeding 2 billion, which includes renowned brands, celebrities, and content creators.
“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it," Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a post on Threads. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will."
Many of Instagram’s influential users have been asking the company to make a text-based app, according to Connor Hayes, a vice president of products.
Meta-owned platforms Instagram and Facebook have gained a reputation for their track record of emulating products from emerging internet competitors, which has proven to be remarkably successful.
Instagram's Reels feature was developed as a direct rival to the popular viral video app TikTok, while its Stories feature was introduced following the rise of Snap Inc.'s Snapchat, which offers disappearing posts.
Meta's previous apps have indirectly competed with Twitter by attracting news publishers, politicians, and prominent individuals to prioritize posting on their platforms instead. This strategy aimed to capture user attention and engagement.
However, the launch of Threads signifies a significant milestone for Meta, as it is the first time the company is directly introducing a Twitter-like application, explicitly targeting the microblogging giant's functionality and user base.