New York (EFE).- One day after the launch of Meta’s new “microblogging” social network, Threads, the executive director of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, said Thursday that her social network can be “imitated” but never ” duplicated”.
Yaccarino wrote to his followers in a tweet: “You created the Twitter community. That is irreplaceable. This is your public square. They often imitate us, but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”
With more than 30 million downloads in the first hours of its launch, observers point out that Threads could become the biggest threat to Twitter, an application that since Elon Musk bought it late last year has become chaotic.
Shortly after the launch of the new social network – which for now only works on smartphones and will be available in more than 100 countries, but none in the European Union – Musk said on Twitter that it is “infinitely preferable that strangers attack you on Twitter, than indulge in false happiness and hide pain on Instagram.”
It is not the first time that Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) has taken advantage of the successful strategies of other social networks by copying their content: In 2016, Instagram launched “Stories” or stories to compete with Snapchat and in 2020 Instagram announced Reels, a short-form video feature struggling with TikTok.
Dubbed by the US media as the “Twitter killer” (Twitter killer), Threads is considered a direct rival to the bird network created in 2006, starting with its name, since that word in English means “threads” and it is part of his own Twitter vocabulary.
Similarities and differences
At first glance, Threads looks like a copy of Twitter where there are posts -photos, videos of up to 5 minutes and texts of up to 500 characters- and you can interact with them in three ways: liking them, reposting them and commenting. .
Just like on Twitter, you can enable notifications to be alerted when a user posts, but you can’t create lists with users.
Neither hashtag or tags can be used, so there are no “trending topics” or trends.
Even Meta’s own president, Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledged how similar the two applications are by tweeting -for the first time in a decade and within minutes of opening his new network- a meme of a Spider-Man pointing at another Spider-Man, image used on the internet to indicate that something is a copy of something else.
Today, on his own social network, the Facebook founder noted that Threads had already reached 30 million downloads.
“This seems like the beginning of something special, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to develop the application,” Zuckerberg noted, referring to the technical problems suffered by the social network in its first hours of launch.