Twitter Rival Threads Surpassed 10m Users

News Desk

Washington: Over 10 million people have signed up for Threads—Meta’s rival to Twitter—within the first few hours of its launch, said the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

“10 million sign-ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account on Thursday.

The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday and will run with no ads for now, but its release in Europe has been delayed over data privacy concerns.

Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Hugh Jackman, as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist.

Here’s THREADS’ entire sign-up process.

This is so clean. So easy.
– instantly get your Instagram @ handle
– auto imports your bio + pic from IG
– instantly follow from your IG

Reallyyy genius way to launch an app. pic.twitter.com/h5yVTZgUI2

— Jack Appleby (@jappleby) July 5, 2023

Threads is a new app, built by the Instagram team, for sharing text updates and joining public conversations.

Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but has not yet replaced one of the world’s biggest social media platforms despite its struggles.

Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk; the pair are known to be bitter rivals and have offered to wrestle it out in a cage fight.

In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme in apparent reference to the similarities between Threads.

pic.twitter.com/MbMxUWiQgp

— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023

Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms over its new Threads app, news website Semafor has reported, citing a letter sent to the Facebook parent’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, by Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro.

Twitter has serious concerns that Meta has engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” Spiro wrote in the letter.

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote.

Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.