“In the next few days, Threads, Twitter’s new competitor, is due to launch. This new offering from Meta, the Facebook group, could become a serious threat to Elon Musk’s short messaging service.

Twitter faces stiff competition. Meta, the company of US entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, is planning to launch its new service “Threads” shortly. The app has been in the app stores for iPhones and Android since Monday Smartphones and is scheduled to officially launch on Thursday, as announced in the Apple App Store. “Threads is the place to gather and discuss everything from your interests to tomorrow’s trends” is how the app is described.

For Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, this competition comes at a critical time: The Twitter management is currently trying to keep the users of Tweetdeck, a user account management tool, into paying customers. Tweetdeck, which is mainly used by professional Twitter users such as journalists, is getting a new version that will be paid after 30 days, the service announced yesterday.

It has been speculated for years that the software could become chargeable for frequent users – even before Musk’s multi-billion takeover of Twitter in autumn 2022.

There are already some smaller Twitter competitors like Mastodon, Bluesky, Tribel, T2 or Truth Social, the short message service of former US President Donald Trump. But Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company, is said to be particularly strong competitor. The US company has experience in operating large online platforms and also has sufficient capital to survive financially over a longer period of time if success does not occur immediately.

• Another advantage is that Meta already has a portfolio of text messaging services with Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger and WhatsApp – and has a base of more than a billion users.

• The new Threads app connects to Meta’s popular photo and video app, Instagram. With other Twitter competitors such as Mastodon, Bluesky and T2, such user networks, which have grown over the years, first have to be rebuilt.

According to information from the “Platformer” specialist service, the new meta offer should be designed in such a way that it can be linked to other networks of the same type. This would be a departure from the previous strategy of the large online corporations, which always rely on closed technical systems with their own rules of use.

This strategy also distinguishes Threads from Twitter. His boss Elon Musk made it clear in December that he doesn’t think much of interfaces with other platforms. He even temporarily blocked accounts that had shared links to other networks such as Facebook, Instagram or Mastodon. It remains to be seen whether Facebook can overtake the current top dog of short message services. There is no question that Meta has staying power with its market capitalization of currently (as of July 2023) over 730 billion US dollars. However, the product “Facebook” would be further weakened by this, since the task for which Facebook was once created would be replaced to a certain extent by threads.

But maybe that’s exactly what the strategy is based on. Because Facebook has been struggling with declining active user numbers for years.