New information about Meta’s new app and would-be Twitter competitor, Threads, was spotted recently that could see the app launching as soon as Thursday this week.
The timing is rather fortuitous after Musk announced that his platform would be temporarily limiting the number of posts users could see per day. Not to mention the blue bird’s most recent announcement that TweetDeck would be joining the Twitter Blue graveyard. Honestly, we’re not wholly convinced that Musk doesn’t have some sort of stake in the launch of Threads.
Will Threads replace tweets?
Folks at The Verge spotted a recent Apple App Store listing for the app foretelling a 6 July 2023 launch. Google’s Play Store also features a page for the app although, curiously, it doesn’t show up in search results in the Android Play Store app yet.
Both listings include a brief description of what Threads aims to be:
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 [sic] 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.
Sounds a lot like another platform we know. It kinda looks like it too, judging from the screenshots on the app store pages. While we were poking around, we couldn’t help but notice the vast amount of user data that would be made available to the app (if you wanted to use it, that is).
Then, if you had any doubt left, members of 9to5Google’s team uncovered what it purports to be the official webpage for Threads complete with a countdown timer that ends at around 16:00 SAST on Thursday, 6 July 2023. When accessed from a PC, the page displays a QR code. Neither conventional QR code scanning methods nor Instagram’s built-in scanner turned up any results except to say it couldn’t open the link.
Accessing the page from an iPhone will take you straight to the App Store page where you’ll be able to pre-download it. Android users on the other hand… you’ll have to wait.
The existence of Threads isn’t new. There have been rumours and plans from Instagram for something called Threads reaching as far back as 2019. A lot has changed in the time since so we’d expect Threads to be at least slightly different to those rumours.
For instance, according to a previous report from The Verge, Threads will be heavily based on Instagram but will also integrate with ActivityPub, the decentralised social media protocol used by Mastodon. This is the very same meeting that apparently lit the flame of the Musk – Zuckerberg cage fight.