Twitter rival Threads — the Meta-owned app seen as a major rival to Elon Musk’s troubled microblogging platform — already has 30 million signups, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday morning.
The newest addition to the Meta line of web-based products debuted with a bang. The much-hyped application, already dubbed the “Twitter Killer app,” officially launched Wednesday night. About two hours after that, 2 million people had already signed up for it, Zuckerberg shared in his third-ever post on the platform.
A few hours later, the Facebook co-founder went back on the site to announce 10 million people had signed up in seven hours. He also added a head-exploding emoji.
Just after 11 a.m. ET, the internet entrepreneur said that number had already tripled.
“Wow, 30 million sign-ups as of this morning,” he wrote. “Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app.”
Described on Apple’s App Store as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app,” the new standalone application, which is available for download for both iOS and Android phones in over 100 countries, is directly linked to users’ Instagram accounts.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said his team “couldn’t be happier with all the excitement about this app,” but also expressed cautious optimism.
“This is a race to the starting line if there ever was one,” he posted Thursday morning.
“The real test is not if we can build up a lot of hype, but if you all find enough value in the app to keep using it over time,” he wrote, adding “tons of basics” that are still missing — including a search feature, hashtags, a following feed, possibly messaging and more.
“We’re on it. The (amazing) team is cranking away. But full disclosure, it’ll take time,” he wrote.
As of 11 a.m., Threads was the most popular topic of discussion on Twitter around the globe, according to Trends24, a company that tracks trending topics on the microblogging platform.
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