Facebook owner Meta is set to launch a new app in a bid to rival Twitter.
Threads, which will be linked to Instagram, is currently available to pre-order in the Apple App Store, with plans for it to go live on Thursday. The new app is being described as “text-based conversation app… where communities come together”.
The news comes in the latest chapter of the rivalry between Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October. The two billionaires agreed to take each other on in a cage fight last month, with the pair's discussion on social media going viral.
And now the arrival of the new app will add to the conflict between the hugely high profile men.
It comes after Twitter announced TweetDeck is to become the next part of the company to be limited to users who have paid for verified status.
The application, which allows users to manage multiple feeds and searches, will be only be accessible to verified users in 30 days, according to a tweet from Twitter Support on Monday evening. A new Tweetdeck version has now been made available with users issued instructions to update.
Elon Musk announced just two days earlier that users were being limited to reading 600 posts per day, saying the rule had been introduced “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”. The limit was later increased to 1,000.
Verified users – who have paid for a subscription to Twitter Blue or are considered “notable” – can read up to 10,000 posts daily after initially being limited to 6,000.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
However, those verified in Twitter - those who have paid for a subscription to Twitter Blue or are considered “notable” - have a much higher limit of 10,000 after an initial limit of 6,000 per day was set.
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