As of midnight on Thursday, July 6, Threads — Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to Elon Musk’s Twitter — had already been downloaded 44 million times. No app in the history of apps has been downloaded by so many people in such a short amount of time. Excited, Zuckerberg wrote on threads that just two hours after the app’s official launch, it had been installed on two million devices. After the next two hours, another three million new Threads subscribers were added to the bill. By late Wednesday, the number had already doubled: ten million downloads. On Thursday morning, the number had tripled even further: thirty million users for Threads already. According to estimates, as reported new York TimesWithin two months the number of users of the app will exceed one hundred million, a feat only ChatGPT has managed so far.
It’s clear that there’s a certain enthusiasm surrounding Threads, thanks to the many celebrities — among them: Jennifer Lopez, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Shakira, Oprah Winfrey, Kourtney Kardashian, Will Smith, to name a few — who have have been able to try it out in preview and these days they are expressing all their joy for this much needed, perhaps inevitable, yet another Twitter clone (do you remember when the salvation of our social lives had to be Mastodon?). . But Twitter, at least for the time being, remains ahead with its 237 million users and seventeen years of history. This is without considering that there have already been many criticisms against Threads: many users were outraged when they learned that, if they ever wanted to cancel their Threads profile, they had to delete their Instagram profile as well. Force Quit will (Meta said it will work to provide) users the ability to quit one app without having to quit another. However, take your time).
Threads’ success hasn’t escaped Elon Musk, who, with the adult mannerisms and sporty attitude that sets him apart, did what everyone expected him to do: spill company secrets on him, threatening Meta with a lawsuit. Accused of creating threads for information covered by and disclosed. By former Twitter employee who now works at Meta. “Competition is fine, not cheating,” Musk wrote on Twitter, adding that Musk now has another reason to beat Zuckerberg (we talked about it here and here). The Chief Tweet was answered by Meta press officer Andy Stone explicitly on the threads: “None of the former Twitter engineers worked on building the app”, he wrote. At one point, Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, even intervened in the discussion: “We wanted flying cars and instead we have seven different Twitter clones”. he wrote, However, since he is the inventor of one of those seven clones, namely Bluesky. In the meantime, whoever wanted to invent a flying machine actually did: who knows whether the inventors have Twitter or Threads or BlueSky or one of the other clone profiles.