Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg says the company’s new app, Threads, passed 10 million sign-ups in its first seven hours.
The Instagram-linked app, launched to challenge Twitter, went live today.
It is seen as the latest move in ongoing rivalry between Meta boss Zuckerberg and Twitter owner Elon Musk.
When asked on Threads whether the app would be ‘bigger than Twitter’, Zuckerberg told the BBC: ‘It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it.’
The BBC notes that experts say Threads could attract Twitter users unhappy with recent changes to the platform
On Threads, posts can be shared to Instagram and vice versa and can include links, photos, and videos of up to five minutes in length.
However, according to the BBC, some early users reported problems when uploading images, hinting at teething problems.
Users see a feed of posts, which Meta calls ‘threads’, from people they follow as well as recommended content.
They are able to control who can ‘mention’ them and filter out replies to posts that contain specific words.
Unfollowing, blocking, restricting or reporting other profiles is also possible, and any accounts that users block on Instagram are automatically blocked on Threads.
Twitter, meanwhile, has said that the popular user dashboard, TweetDeck, will go behind a paywall in 30 days’ time.
The move is the latest push by Musk as he tries to get users to sign up to Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.
[Image: Meta]
*This report has been updated