Meta's Twitter rival listed on App Store, expected to launch on July 6

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
4 Jul 2023 08:22

The move comes on the same day that Elon Musk's Twitter announced that all users must be "Verified" to access TweetDeck.

A screenshot of the Threads on the App Store

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp's mother company, Meta, is set to launch Threads, a micro-blogging application designed to rival Twitter, on July 6, its App Store listing showed.

Threads appeared for pre-order on Monday in the Apple App Store, where it indicated that users are expected to be able to download it on July 6.

"Say more with Threads - Instagram’s text-based conversation app," the description on the app store read.

"Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things - or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world," the description specified.

The move comes on the same day that Elon Musk's Twitter announced that all users must be "Verified" to access TweetDeck.

Over the weekend, Musk outraged many Twitter users by imposing limits on the number of posts that can be read per day.

The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 10,000 tweets a day. Non-verified users -- the free accounts that make up the majority of users -- are limited to reading 1,000 tweets per day. New unverified accounts would be limited to 500 tweets.

The decision was made "to address extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation" by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon.

Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

"Goodbye Twitter" was a trending topic in the United States following Musk's announcement.

Twitter's billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.

The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.

According to Musk, much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site.

"Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience," he indicated.

He added that "almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data."