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Meta’s Twitter Rival Threads Crosses 10 Million Sign-Ups Within First Few Hours of Launch
More than 10 million people have signed up to Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, within the first few hours of its launch, the Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday.
Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of social media’s most iconic companies, despite its epic struggles.
The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 23:00 GMT (4:30 am IST) on Wednesday, and will run with no ads for now.
“10 million sign ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account Thursday.
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.
Zuckerberg spent the first few hours of the platform’s launch replying to new users.
“One thing that’s up is the number of world champion MMA fighters on Threads, especially now that you’re here!” he wrote in a reply to American MMA fighter Jon Jones.
“Round one of this thing is getting off to a good start,” he said in another.
Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk — the pair are known to be bitter rivals, and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out.
In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in an apparent reference to the similarity of the two platforms.
Back on Threads, he wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.
Be kind
Threads was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, thereby sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.
Zuckerberg is widely understood to be taking advantage of Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to communication channel for celebrities, companies and politicians.
“It’s as simple as that: if an Instagram user with a large number of followers such as Kardashian or a Bieber or a Messi begins posting on Threads regularly, a new platform could quickly thrive,” strategic financial analyst Brian Wieser said on Substack.
Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users “to make it as big as Twitter.”
“Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening,” she added.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build “an open and friendly platform for conversations.”
“The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind,” he said.
Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.
Musk hired advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to steady the ship, but she has not been spared his whimsy.
The Tesla tycoon said last week that he was limiting access to Twitter to ward off AI companies from “scraping” the site to train their technology.
Musk then angered Twitter’s most devoted aficionados by declaring that access to its TweetDeck product — which allows users to view a fast flow of tweets at once — would be for paying customers only.
EU ‘many months’ away
Meta has its legion of critics too, especially in Europe, and despite Instagram’s massive user base, they could slow the site’s development.
The company is criticised mainly for its handling of personal data — the essential ingredient for targeted ads that help it rake in billions of dollars in profits every quarter.
Mosseri said he regretted that the EU launch was delayed, but if Meta had waited for regulatory clarity from Brussels, Threads would remain “many, many, many, months away.”
“I was worried that our window would close, because timing is important,” he added to Platformer, a tech news site.
According to a source close to the matter, Meta was wary of a new law called the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which sets strict rules for the world’s “gatekeeper” internet companies.
One rule restricts platforms from transferring personal data between products, as would potentially be the case between Threads and Instagram.
Meta was caught out for doing just that after it bought the messaging app WhatsApp, and European regulators will be on high alert to ensure that the company doesn’t do so illegally with Threads.
Back to Twitter?
Globally, the Threads hashtag on Twitter has garnered over a million tweets, with many users jokingly suggesting users would be returning to Twitter.
“10 mins into threads app. Me coming back to Twitter,” one user wrote, sharing a video of a man sprinting.
Another shared an image of Homer Simpson running back and forth between the Twitter and Threads logos.
By midday local time Thursday, Threads was the top trending topic on Japan Twitter, but many users expressed concerns over data privacy.
“Threads is run by Meta, isn’t it? It will definitely leak your real name or the game you are playing, or put you in the list of your workplace company friends,” wrote one user.
Another said: “Meta loves to collect private information and I don’t trust the way it treats private information. I also have the impression that this is a company hated by EU, so I’m reluctant.”
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YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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