There is talk that Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg company, is working on developing a rival for Twitter shortly since it has been announced that it wants public figures to join it, including the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey, who are either planning to use it or will refer to it as a rival for Twitter.
This standalone application is codenamed Project92, but a report by tech news site The Verge suggests that the official title could be Threads. This is based on its codename.
During an internal meeting on Thursday, Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, told employees that the app was Meta's response to Twitter, the social network owned by Facebook and Instagram.
In addition to allowing users to follow accounts they already follow on Instagram, Meta's image-sharing application may also offer them the opportunity to bring over followers they previously had on decentralized platforms such as Mastodon, if they choose to do so.
Meta spokesperson says the platform is being developed and released soon.
According to Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, Meta's platform is currently being coded. There is no specific date for releasing the app though the tech giant intends to do so very soon. Several sources speculate that the launch could happen as early as June, but that is still far from certain.
In recent weeks, screenshots of the company's upcoming app have surfaced online, providing a glimpse of how it might look shortly. The screenshots were shown internally to senior employees.
This BBC report is based on confirmation made to the BBC by sources within the company that these screenshots are genuine. The new platform layout will likely be familiar to people who use Twitter as a social media platform.
The screenshot shows that Meta will allow users to log in with their Facebook or Instagram ID number. This will save them the hassle of creating their ID number later. There are several options available to users for how to share their thoughts in a Twitter-style prompt, with other users able to like, comment, and re-share (basically retweet) their posts. Further, based on the screenshot, it appears that users may also be able to create a thread as well, which is a tangle of posts placed one after the other in a particular order.
Moreover, according to The Verge, the app would be integrated with ActivityPub, a technology underpinning Mastodon, a decentralized collection of thousands of web pages that serves as a Twitter rival. This technology will allow social networks to interact with each other more easily. Theoretically speaking, users of the upcoming Meta app can move their accounts and followers over to apps supported by ActivityPub, like Mastodon, the new Meta app.
The app is expected to be based on Instagram and users will be able to log in with their Instagram username and password, while their followers, user bio, and verification information will also transfer over to the new app as well, according to earlier reports.
The app aims to give creators a "stable place to build and grow their audience" in addition to providing a safe, easy-to-use, and reliable place to create.
There is no question that Elon Musk's Twitter will be facing a lot of opposition from the short text-based network P92, which has the potential to surpass both BlueSky and Mastodon in terms of its level of rivalry with Elon Musk's Twitter. The fact that both Mastodon and BlueSky have attracted users who were disillusioned with Twitter is a testament to the fact that building your social network from scratch and reestablishing the community from scratch is not easy.
Meta's Instagram community, however, is enormous, boasting more than a billion users worldwide. This far surpasses Twitter's estimated 300 million users, although Twitter's numbers are no longer verifiable.
Moreover, the report points out that Meta, which is inspired by Twitter, will be able to populate a user's info via Instagram's account system in much the same way as Twitter does. A Meta spokesperson reportedly told me on the sidelines of the meeting that the company has already been working with prominent personalities such as Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama to attract others to try the "Project 92" web app by joining the platform.
As Musk has said, Twitter under his leadership has been experiencing a difficult time, although he has insisted Twitter's users have not declined since the Tesla boss purchased the platform back in October. Musk claimed several weeks after purchasing Twitter that a peak of more than 250 million daily active users had been achieved. This was a record high then.
Because Twitter is based almost entirely on advertising revenue, it is experiencing financial difficulties.
Several concerns were responsible for the current advertiser boycott, including the degradation of the platform's moderation standards and the botched re-launch of Twitter's subscription service. This led to several verified impersonator accounts that started appearing on the platform.
There is no doubt Meta has made a bold and ambitious move in entering the social media landscape with its announcement that it will launch a dedicated app to compete with Twitter's dominance in its space. By reshaping how people engage in real-time conversations in real-time, Meta has the potential to disrupt the status quo and disrupt people's social norms.
The battle for microblogging supremacy intensifies as users eagerly await the release of this new app. It promises to be an exciting and transformational time in online communication as the world becomes more integrated.
