THREADS - Meta / Facebook's TWITTER Killer - 150M+ Users - Add Your @

[Luke]

Bring it on!

Mark Zuckerberg goes in for the kill as Elon Musk’s Twitter bleeds ad dollars
Story by Matthew Field • 19h ago

At a gathering of Meta staff last week, Chris Cox, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants, unveiled what he called “our response to Twitter”. The product chief showed off what has internally been codenamed “Project 92”, or in some iterations “Barcelona”: a prototype app that the Facebook-developer hopes will finally kill its rival.

The app is expected to be called Threads and screenshots suggest it will feature a continuous scroll of text like Twitter with buttons similar to the Like and Retweet functions, according to technology news site The Verge.

Zuckerberg’s company is already courting celebrities and influencers to test the app. Meta has been negotiating with TV host Oprah Winfrey and Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama to open accounts, hoping that high-profile early users can help tempt the masses to join. “I know for a fact they’ve been talking to a British celebrity, and some US big name stars,” says Matt Navarra, a social media consultant.

A launch of the new app could come as soon as “the end of the month or beginning of next month, they have been onboarding people for a little while”, he claims. Threads, which will be separate to Meta’s popular Instagram, is expected to feature a 500 character limit on its posts, staying true to the original ethos of Twitter even as the rival platform abandons shorter Tweets in favour of lengthy essays.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technol ... r-AA1cJilU

Wonder if they'll allow anon accounts or users have to be verified like Facebook.

[neonzx]

Meh. Super HARD-PASS from me on any Meta/Zuckerberg personal info harvesting sites.

[Azastan]

Meh. Super HARD-PASS from me on any Meta/Zuckerberg personal info harvesting sites.

Yeah.

Also, I am always annoyed when I go to my farm page because 'Meta' decided that my farm page is a BUSINESS.

It's not a business, it's a page so that my rescue friends can know what's going on with my horses. I don't sell anything.

'Meta' also decided that my page for my dahlias is a BUSINESS. It's not a business, it's where I record how the dahlias are doing and post photos of them.

It takes forever for my farm page to switch over from my personal page. For some odd reason, I can now go to my dahlia page without having to wait for it to switch.

I don't need or want 'business' information on my farm page or my dahlia page. But there's no way to contact FB/Meta to let them know that NEITHER PAGE IS A BUSINESS.

[Foggy]

Also, I am always annoyed when I go to my farm page because 'Meta' decided that my farm page is a BUSINESS.

They think Fogbow is a business, too also.

[Uninformed]

“Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg agree to hold cage fight”:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65981876

“Two of the world's most high-profile technology billionaires - Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg - have agreed to fight each other in a cage match.
Mr Musk posted a message on his social media platform Twitter that he was "up for a cage fight" with Mr Zuckerberg.
Mr Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, then posted a screenshot of Mr Musk's tweet with the caption "send me location".
"The story speaks for itself," a Meta spokesperson told the BBC.
Mr Musk then replied to Mr Zuckerberg's response with: "Vegas Octagon."
The Octagon is the competition mat and fenced-in area used for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts. The UFC is based in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mr Musk, who turns 52 later this month, also tweeted: "I have this great move that I call "The Walrus", where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing."
He also tweeted: "I almost never work out, except for picking up my kids & throwing them in the air."
Meanwhile, 39-year-old Mr Zuckerberg has already been training in mixed martial arts (MMA) and has recently won jiu-jitsu tournaments.”

[Dave from down under]

“The fight for ultimate domination of the world begins now!”

2 anorak points for which movie that was badly quoted from

[neonzx]

Sounds all very homoerotic.

[Suranis]

Speculation due to getting into the head of these retards over the last few years:

Elon announced this cage match on his own in order to get face over Zuck. In his plan Zuck will deny its going to happen or truthfully say he has no idea what the hell a reporter is talking about. Then Elon can claim that Zuck had agreed to do the cage match and then got scared and is now pretending that he didn't because he is a pussy. Musk proven as the real man without having to actually risk his precious skin in actually fighting.

Because one thing is 100% true. Musk is full of shit and loves causing chaos.

[Luke]

People are looking for an offramp from the sewer Twitter has become. Since Musk, I get 2-3 OnlyFans girls following me every day, it's easy to tell because they follow hundreds but only have a few followers.

For me, I'd rather have Zuck have data than evil Elon Musk. But they aren't going to get much data from me anyway, it'll be an alt FB account anyway. And if it helps take Musk and his vile Twitter service down, good. Let him run his service with white nationalists, racists, homophobes and bigots paying $8.

Twitter chaos leaves door open for Meta's rival app
Joseph Boyle and Jules Bonnard with Thomas Urbain in New York
Tue, July 4, 2023 at 7:00 AM EDT

Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week. Zuckerberg's Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as "Threads, an Instagram app", available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is "expected" this Thursday. The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run "sanely" irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.

Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a "verified" account. On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many. He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped "extreme levels" of data to train their models. But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to get profits rolling. In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, would be limited to verified accounts next month.

John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave too. And he added that Musk's decision to sack thousands of workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become "technically unusable". Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on advertising and boost income from subscriptions. Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into "hand-to-hand combat" to win back advertisers. "How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most engaged free users potentially will never see their ads because of data caps on their usage," tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter. Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend's chaos had been "remarkably bad" for both users and advertisers. "Advertisers depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter is currently decimating both," he told AFP.

He said Twitter had "moved from stable to startup" and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter's rivals to suck up any cash from advertisers. The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of users immediately brought a backlash. Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply failed to pay the bill for his servers. French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social network content, which "is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and lacking in context".

Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter's head of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such performance problems that users needed to be forced to log in "doesn't pass the sniff test". "Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access," he wrote on the Bluesky social network -- another Twitter rival. "We knew about it. It was fine."

https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-chaos-le ... 59591.html

[pipistrelle]

For me, I'd rather have Zuck have data than evil Elon Musk. But they aren't going to get much data from me anyway, it'll be an alt FB account anyway. And if it helps take Musk and his vile Twitter service down, good. Let him run his service with white nationalists, racists, homophobes and bigots paying $8.

Or as I suspect a lot of fake accounts.

[Foggy]

[Reality Check]

Better hurry up Meta or there won't be anything left to kill. The bird will be dead.

[Luke]

Thursday!

Instagram’s Threads app to launch 6 July amid mass backlash against Elon Musk’s Twitter
Interface of Meta’s app appears similar to Twitter, whose tweet viewing restrictions have driven users to join rival platforms BlueSky and Mastodon
Threads v Twitter – is this the main bout between Musk and Zuckerberg?
Josh Taylor @joshgnosis Tue 4 Jul 2023 00.57 EDT

Meta’s answer to Twitter, a new app called Threads, will launch on Thursday, just as users of the platform owned by Elon Musk seek out alternatives in droves. The Threads app, which is linked to Instagram, appeared in the Apple app store on Tuesday ahead of Thursday’s launch. Meta has launched a countdown website https://www.threads.net/ for the release.

A preview of the “text-based conversation” app says Threads will be a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow”.

“Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things – or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world,” the promotional text says.

Screenshots suggest people will be able to use their Instagram handle to log in to Threads and follow their existing contacts. The app appears to share a similar user interface to Twitter, with similar features including reposting, liking and allowing users to limit who can reply to posts.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... unch-rival

[Foggy]

Oh god, I'm being co-opted!

Edit: There's already an app called Threads in the Android store.

[Flatpoint High]

Meh. Super HARD-PASS from me on any Meta/Zuckerberg personal info harvesting sites.

Yeah.

Also, I am always annoyed when I go to my farm page because 'Meta' decided that my farm page is a BUSINESS.

It's not a business, it's a page so that my rescue friends can know what's going on with my horses. I don't sell anything.

'Meta' also decided that my page for my dahlias is a BUSINESS. It's not a business, it's where I record how the dahlias are doing and post photos of them.

It takes forever for my farm page to switch over from my personal page. For some odd reason, I can now go to my dahlia page without having to wait for it to switch.

I don't need or want 'business' information on my farm page or my dahlia page. But there's no way to contact FB/Meta to let them know that NEITHER PAGE IS A BUSINESS.

they did the same w/my ACTOR's page.

[Reality Check]

Thursday!

Not a good sign. The Threads page https://www.threads.net/ does not open in FIrefox. I had to use Chrome.

[neonzx]

Thursday!

Not a good sign. The Threads page https://www.threads.net/ does not open in FIrefox. I had to use Chrome.

Worked in Firefox for me (on PC, didn't check on phone).

[Reality Check]

Worked in Firefox for me (on PC, didn't check on phone).

It was an ad on, Facebook Container, that prevented it from opening. I tried a private window first and that worked so I started disabling ad ons and extensions.

[Luke]

Facebook Container is effective. I have all that on Chrome, but keep Brave more clear for places I need to provide more data. Using different browsers for different tasks is helpful.

Meta is not kidding around. They have been signing up a lot of prominent accounts, including news and entertainment stars. The media event will be big. Basically your Instagram account will admit you, and its not that hard to set up an alt Facebook account. "In 2023, the photo sharing site is projected to reach 127.2 million monthly active users in the United States, up from 114.6 million users in 2020."

No wonder Elon wants to fight. If he's left with his dopey MAGAts who will pay $8 (and who knows if they will, most of them just want to rail on non-MAGAts), they could be down the tubes by Christmas. Meanwhile Pravda Social's SPAC, DWAC, is offering an $18M fine to the SEC to settle (although that won't fix all their issues).

When Jason Miller's China-funded site GRFTR (er, GETTR) started (and had to look up the name, forgot it), they allowed their users to import all their tweets into the system. Because it was Jason, it also brought all the followers along, which folks quickly realized was a fraud because those people weren't on GETTR. Done properly, allowing Thread to import tweets (hmm, was that the "scraping" Musk was panicked about??), that head start and 127.2M users would be quite a start.

July 4th was the 2 year anniversary of GRFTR -- and Jason is back with T****.
Trump adviser Jason Miller launches 'cancel-free' social media platform
GETTR officially launched on July 4 to declare 'independence' from Big Tech
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump- ... a-platform

[Reality Check]

I hope Threads develops something like Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck was the only reason I kept my Twitter account. I tried Mastadon and Post but they had no similar interface. If I have to pay $8 monthly I am gone. Even if they do not have something at launch I think Threads will eventually develop something or a third party will. Tweetdeck was developed by a third party and sold to Twitter.

I laugh when the media says "Tweetdeck is primarily used by large companies". I have no idea where they got that notion. For me it is just a convenient tool to follow Twitter accounts I like, lists, and particular subject matter elections and trials.

[Suranis]

https://www.independent.ie/business/tec ... 20337.html

No Instagram Threads app in the EU: Irish DPC says Meta's new Twitter rival won't be launched here

Meta’s new Twitter rival wants to suck Instagram users’ data, including health, location, search history and sensitive information, into the new Threads service. Under EU data privacy rules, it faces higher hurdles than in the US or UK, where it is launching on Thursday.

Yesterday at 14:54

Meta will not launch its new Twitter rival, Threads, in Ireland or the EU for the foreseeable future.

It is being released in the US and the UK on Thursday of this week as an alternative to Twitter.

A spokesperson for Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) said that the regulator had been in contact about the new service and that it would not be rolled out in the EU “at this point”.

However, it is understood that the DPC has not actively blocked the service. Instead, the tech giant has not yet prepared the service for a European launch outside the UK, which is not fully governed by GDPR or EU privacy rules.

Sources close to Meta said that the tech giant has refrained from rolling the service out in the EU because of what the company believes is a lack of clarity contained in the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Under the Act, companies such as Meta become “gatekeepers”, with restrictions on how they mingle users’ personal data.

► Show Spoiler

The new Threads platform is designed to import data from Instagram, including behavioural and advertising information.

In its US format, the platform tells users that it will collect a wide variety of data from users, including health, financial information, browsing histories, location, purchases, contacts, search history and sensitive information.

In the EU, Meta has been prevented from launching advertising services on Whatsapp that uses data from Facebook or Instagram. The tech giant is allowed to mingle the two data streams in the US, which has weaker privacy laws.

It is unclear when, or if, Meta will launch Threads in Ireland and the EU. A spokesperson for Meta was unavailable to comment on the matter.

The new Meta platform comes after a week of disruption and policy changes for Twitter.

Elon Musk’s company announced that it would begin limiting the number of tweets that all users could read, due to alleged data-scraping practices from unnamed services.

Twitter also announced that TweetDeck is to become the next part of the company to be limited to users who have paid for verified status.

The application, which allows users to manage multiple feeds and searches, will only be accessible to verified users in 30 days, according to a tweet from Twitter Support on Monday evening.

[neonzx]

The new Threads platform is designed to import data from Instagram, including behavioural and advertising information.

In its US format, the platform tells users that it will collect a wide variety of data from users, including health, financial information, browsing histories, location, purchases, contacts, search history and sensitive information.

ENJOY YOUR TWITTER REPLACEMENT.

[Slim Cognito]

Jeez, why don't they post our colonoscopy videos while they're at it?

[chancery]

I have an Instagram account, following and followed by about a dozen people. I check it rarely, and post it even more rarely, partly because the interface has become more confusing and more full of promoted stuff.

How will Meta acquire my "health, financial information, browsing histories, location, purchases, contacts, search history and sensitive information"?

[Reality Check]

Let's face facts. The way these large social media companies are so profitable is that the more they know about us the more money they can convince sponsors to pay for targeted advertising. I have browsed something on Amazon or read an article on a certain technology or product and received Facebook ads on that product or a similar one within 5 minutes. Yeah, it kind of sucks but welcome to modern life.

I find the scammers more disgusting. Like the ones who claim they took over my devices six months ago and have all the videos of me masturbating that they will send to all my contacts if I don't deposit to their Bitcoin account. Or the ones who pretend to be my hosting service and that email account (on which I have no storage limit) is almost full so I better click on their link to fix it.

So I am more willing to have my data analyzed by Google or Facebook for free and getting targeted ads than pay Elmo $8 monthly only for the privilege of using his shitty platform that is only going to get worse over time and have my data used anyway.