Meta Platforms (META.O) launched Threads, a direct challenge to Twitter, on Wednesday, gaining millions of members in hours as it aimed to capitalize on its rival’s significantly weakened status following a series of catastrophic moves by owner Elon Musk.
Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, as well as famous politicians such as Democratic U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were among the first to join the new platform.
“Let’s get started. “Welcome to Threads,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote beside a fire emoji in his first post on the app. He said that the app had 10 million sign-ups in seven hours.
He also took to Twitter, posting a well-known meme of Spiderman battling Spiderman – a satirical dig at Musk and the rivalry between the two services.
According to analysts, Threads’ ties to Instagram may provide it with a built-in user base and advertising equipment. This might suck ad dollars away from Twitter at a time when the company’s new CEO is attempting to turn things around.
While Threads is a standalone app, users can log in with their Instagram credentials and follow the same profiles, possibly making it an easy addition to Instagram’s more than 2 billion monthly active users’ existing habits.
“Investors can’t help but be a little excited about the prospect that Meta really has a ‘Twitter-Killer’,” said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at investment firm AJ Bell.
Others saw the launch of Threads as an opportunity to create a less toxic version of Twitter.
“May this platform have good vibes, strong community, excellent humor, and less harassment,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her post.
The program, like Twitter, includes brief text posts that users can like, re-post, and reply to, but it does not support direct messaging. According to a Meta blog article, posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photographs, and videos up to five minutes long.
According to the blog post, it is available in over 100 countries on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
Meta stock closed up 3% on Wednesday, outperforming advances by rival tech businesses.
