You must have heard about the scandal surrounding Elon Musk buying Twitter, causing havoc and mayhem!
In case you haven’t, here’s what you’ve missed. Elon has recently made it so blue tick verified users can read 6,000 tweets a day, general profiles 600 tweets a day, and new profiles 300 tweets a day – the reason? Data scraping issues. So of course, Mark Zuckerberg / Meta have designed a new app… Threads.
What is the Meta Threads App and how does it work?
Mark Zuckerberg has announced the initial version of Threads, an app built by the Instagram team for sharing with text. Whether you’re a creator or a casual poster, Threads offers a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations. So, how does it work?
- Meta Threads is a new app for sharing text updates and joining public conversations
- You log in using your Instagram account and posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length
- Meta are still working on making Threads compatible with all social networks and are saying it will ‘shape the future of the internet’
What are the benefits of the Meta Threads App?
The app has only been available for a matter of hours and is already proving to be a huge rival to Twitter. Some benefits of the Threads app include:
- It’s a straightforward text based conversation
- You can compose and share messages in real time
- There are less limitations compared to Twitter
- It’s within Instagram, so there’s no need to create a whole new profile on a new channel
- It uses Instagram to immediately build your following and populate your feed
How to get started with the Meta Threads App
It’s easy to get started with Threads, and as mentioned, you simply use your Instagram account to log in.
Your Instagram username and verification will carry over, with the option to customise your profile specifically for Threads.
Everyone who is under 16 (or under 18 in certain countries) will be defaulted into a private profile when they join Threads. You can choose to follow the same accounts you do on Instagram or find more people. The core accessibility features available on Instagram today, such as screen reader support and AI-generated image descriptions, are also enabled on Threads.
What’s the potential impact of the Meta Threads App on user privacy
According to Tech Crunch, information provided about the app’s privacy shows the app may collect highly sensitive information about users in order to profile their digital activity. This includes health and financial data, precise location, browsing history, contacts, search history and other sensitive information.
As we well know, Meta makes its money from tracking audiences around the web using behaviours to benefit advertising – so this isn’t a surprise. But it does raise questions over whether Threads will be able to launch in the European Union after the Facebook user privacy scandal; where Meta and the processing of Facebook users’ personal data (performance of a contract) was found unlawful at the start of this year.
What do we think?
We’re in two minds, this is a very new channel which could still arise issues.
However, with 5 million sign-ups in just the first four hours of launch (according to Zuckerberg’s own Thread) we cannot disregard that this could be the new big thing.
Is Twitter on its way out? Could this be the replacement? Let’s see how it unfolds.
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