The Instagram companion app, which is being hailed as Twitter’s new chief rival, was launched a day earlier than expected.
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Meta’s Threads app, which shares a similar format with Twitter and is widely seen as Elon Musk’s most significant competition since the billionaire took over the social media platform, was launched Wednesday evening in a surprise announcement.Key Facts
Threads, which is now live on Apple’s App Store, will be linked to users’ Instagram accounts and offer a real-time platform, like Twitter’s, that allows text posts of up to 500 characters.
The app will also support photos and videos that can be up to five minutes long, according to Instagram.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in an interview with The Verge that Twitter’s “volatility” and “unpredictability” under Musk is what gave Meta the opportunity to compete with Twitter, which has been plagued by outages and unpopular limits to the number of tweets users can view in a single day.
