How does Mark Zuckerberg compete with Twitter?

In the coming days, the competitor’s “topics” contest will begin on Twitter. For Elon Musk’s SMS service, the new offering could develop from a Facebook group into a serious competitor.

The short messaging service Twitter has to face stiff competition. The Facebook Meta group of American entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg wants to launch its new service “Thread” in the coming days. The app has been listed in the app stores for iPhone and Android smartphones since Monday. It should start Thursday, it said today in the Apple App Store. “Themes is the place to meet and discuss everything from the topics that matter to you to the trends of tomorrow,” the app’s description reads.

For Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, the competing offer comes at a critical time: Twitter management is currently trying to convert users of the Tweetdeck app, a tool for managing user accounts, into paying customers. Tweetdeck, which is mainly used by professional Twitter users like journalists, is getting a new version that will be subject to a fee after 30 days, the service announced yesterday.

It’s been speculated for years that the frequent user program could become subject to fees — even before Musk’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of Twitter in fall 2022.

Technical problems on Twitter

It was also announced over the weekend that Twitter would restrict viewing of tweets in the future. Accordingly, paying customers with a subscription should be able to read up to 10,000 tweets per day and users without a subscription up to 1,000 posts. Musk explained the move by saying that there have been too many attempts to siphon large amounts of data from Twitter. The announcement was followed by technical problems with Tweetdeck, where, among other things, the display of the listings crashed.

After Musk’s acquisition of the site, Twitter users have already shown their dissatisfaction with the news service for other reasons and have sometimes reacted angrily. Many users didn’t like the relaxation of moderation guidelines, and they didn’t like the introduction of verified accounts with a subscription fee.

Over a billion dead users

There are already some smaller competitors to Twitter such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Tribel, T2 or Truth Social, the short message service of former US President Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg’s meta group is a particularly strong contender. The American company knows how to run large online platforms and also has enough capital to survive financially for a long time if success does not come quickly.

Another plus is that Meta already has a suite of text messaging services with Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger and WhatsApp – and has a user base of over 1 billion.

The new Thread app links to the popular Meta photo and video app, Instagram. With other Twitter competitors like Mastodon, Bluesky, and T2, those user networks that have grown over the years have to be rebuilt first.

Looks like the threads should be tied

According to information from the specialized service “Platformer”, the display of the new meta should be designed so that it can be linked to other networks of the same type. This will be a break from the previous strategy of large online companies, which always rely on closed technical systems with their own rules of use.

This strategy differentiates Topics from Twitter. Its boss, Elon Musk, made it clear in December that he doesn’t think much of doing business with other platforms. For a short while, it even banned accounts that shared links to other networks like Facebook, Instagram, or Mastodon.