Twitter tells Meta to ‘Threads’ carefully
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It wasn’t a cage match as Zuckerberg had imagined! This week, Meta’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg fulfilled his 15 year-old dream by launching a much-teased rival to Twitter, Threads.
Yes, Zuckerberg tried acquiring the bird app a few times. But it just never worked out. He then started building and acquiring social media platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp respectively. And the Twitter idea probably took a backseat.
Until this Thursday… when Zuckerberg launched Threads to take on Musk.
Meta’s new Threads social network app is the biggest talk in tech right now after officially launching and scoring 48 million sign-ups on its first day.?
Twitter has now issued a legal letter addressed to Zuckerberg regarding its intent to take legal action against Meta for “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property”.
The accusation alleges Meta hired dozens of former Twitter employees with access to Twitter trade secrets and IP which Meta used to its advantage in developing its Threads social networking app.?
The letter bluntly describes Threads as a Twitter “copy-cat app ”. The letter also reminds Meta it is not allowed to crawl or scrape Twitter’s data.
Alex Spiro, the attorney who drafted the letter added that Twitter intends to enforce its intellectual property rights and demands the stoppage of any further Twitter trade secrets or confidential information being leaked.
Twitter’s Elon Musk tweeted in light of these alleged messages and lawsuit rumors stating "Competition is fine, cheating is not".
Well, over the past few months (and years), we’ve seen a few Twitter alternatives pop up. We had Mastodon which briefly gained popularity when Musk took over Twitter . But then the users slowly dropped. Another Twitter’s rival is India’s very own Koo. It did make noise in some parts of the world but daily user count seems to have halved to four million in the past year . We also have an ex-Twitter CEO backed, Bluesky , but the reviews don't inspire a lot of confidence just yet.
But why are people already calling Threads the potential Twitter killer?
To understand whether Threads can kill Twitter, we need to first answer the big question — why do people actually use Twitter?
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Well, in one word — for news. As per Twitter’s own survey, that’s what 55 per cent of people claimed. It’s ‘the’ place for real-time updates whenever something happens whether it’s good, bad or ugly.
Will Threads bring good news or bad, only time will tell!
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Software Engineer - my opinions are my own
1 年Meta bought a lot of social networking patents from Microsoft. It is twitter who have to "thread" carefully.