Meta appears to be gearing up for the launch of Threads, its competitor to microblogging site Twitter.

The rumors are growing stronger and Meta is making no effort to refute them: its own microblogging site, Threads, would be competing with Twitter tomorrow.

Hints

The fact that Meta was working on a competitor for Twitter had been in the air for some time. But now everything seems to be very close. There is now a meaningless website and an app graces the Google Playstore and Apple App Store. In both cases, Threads is presented as an Instagram app.

The app can already be pre-ordered in the App Store and there are even some screenshots to see. This not only allows you to use your Instagram account in threads, but also allows you to recycle your contacts from this app. Another screenshot suggests a layout similar to Twitter.

Both at Apple and in the Google Playstore, it is noticeable how much data threads want/can collect from you. Meta will always be meta, just look at the battle between Facebook and Europe.

Twitter is dead, long live threads

The timing is of course no coincidence. The little blue bird lies wounded next to a tree and Meta is the cat who happens to sneak up on it. With over two billion Instagram members versus 350 million Twitter members, the potential of threads is not an unrealistic “threat”.

Elon Musk has reached new heights with his antics on Twitter in the past few days, causing murmurs to reignite among users on the web. The TweetDeck tool is now only available to Twitter Blue (Read, Pay) subscribers and the regular app once again had more bugs than a third-rate motel.

The highlight of the week was the announcement that Users have a limit how many tweets they might read in a day, with the number depending on your status. This restriction was soon relaxed and now appears to have disappeared, but it still dealt a serious blow to Musk’s reputation as his own social media playground. The reason for this decision was the expiring contract with Google Cloud (with whom Musk has been arguing about money for a long time), which meant that Twitter was able to process significantly less data.

Of course, Twitter is also still suffering from the massive layoffs of its tech and support teams. Of course, without a good team, it is difficult to keep a global online platform running smoothly.

What now?

So there’s a countdown to tomorrow to see if the fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk continues online before it comes to a real cage fight. The question is also where threads will be available, for example a first rollout in the USA alone is not unthinkable.