Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that his Threads app, a micro-blogging competitor to Elon Musk’s Twitter, had more than 10 million sign-ups in just seven hours.
Announcing the Threads launch, Meta — also the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — said it would offer “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.”
It added that Threads users will require an Instagram account to log into the new app, and “posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.”
The app has launched in the U.K., the U.S. and other countries, but Meta not yet made it available in the EU.
Meta’s launch of the Threads app comes amid turbulence at Twitter, where thousands of staff have been laid off since billionaire entrepreneur Musk bought the platform for $44 billion late in 2022.
Over the weekend, Musk announced that some accounts would be limited in the numbers of tweets they could read, while Twitter announced that the Tweetdeck dashboard would become a subscription-only feature, which only verified Twitter users would be able to access.