Meta launch Threads, a Twitter clone

[Norphy]

Threads: Ten million join Meta's Twitter rival, Zuckerberg says https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66112648

 

 

Have you seen the access they’re asking for on the iOS app? I assume they’re asking similar on Android. They’re insane!

 

 

Why in the name of God do they need my health information for a Twitter clone?

[6Foot2]

If you change your mind about having a "Threads" account:

 

Link: Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says | TechCrunch

 

... right now, Threads and Instagram are all one account, so deleting one would delete the other ...

[2ilent8cho]

If it's Meta/Facebook I won't use it unless I absolutely need to. I moved from WhatsApp to Signal, and I only use Facebook because thats annoyingly where the members of the car groups seem to have moved to so ended up undeleting my Facebook account a few years ago to access it. So Threads? No way.

[6Foot2]

Link: Twitter threatens to sue Meta over rival Threads app | Twitter | The Guardian

 

Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly billed as a rival, claiming the company has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”.

 

In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, first published by the news outlet Semafor, a lawyer for Twitter said the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.

 

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Alex Spiro wrote in the letter.

 

Meta launched Threads, a text-based conversation app intended to rival Twitter, on Wednesday to a largely positive reception. The company said Threads garnered 30m sign-ups in less than 24 hours after launching, apparently making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever. Threads accounts are linked to Instagram profiles, making the process to sign up seamless between apps and giving the Twitter copycat a built-in user base.

 

Zuckerberg said Threads was Meta’s attempt at taking a shot to build a “public conversations app with 1bn+ people” – an opportunity that Twitter had but “hasn’t nailed”.

 

“This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!” Zuckerberg said in a thread on Thursday.

 

Twitter claims in the cease-and-desist that Meta has poached dozens of former employees in the past year, some of whom “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information” and “many” of whom have “improperly” kept Twitter documents or electronic devices.

 

“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” the letter reads.

 

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

 

In response to the letter, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, posted on Threads that there are no engineers on the team that used to work at Twitter.

 

It’s unclear what evidence Twitter has that former employees who now work at Meta continue to have access to Twitter intellectual property or trade secrets. Twitter responded to a request for comment with an automated email of a poop emoji.

 

Twitter also said Meta was “prohibited” from scraping data from any Twitter service. Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, has recently made several moves to purportedly curtail any efforts to scrape Twitter data, including limiting the number of tweets users can see in a day. At the time, Musk said it was in response to companies using Twitter to train their AI models.

 

A cursory search of LinkedIn conducted by the Guardian found several Meta employees hired in the last year who previously worked at Twitter. However, it is fairly common for tech employees to jump from one company to another, particularly if they’ve worked at a social media platform.

 

The threat of a lawsuit over trade secret appropriation is not without precedent or consequence in the tech industry. In 2018, for instance, the Google-owned self-driving car company Waymo sued Uber over trade secrets theft, after a top executive at Waymo left the company to join Uber’s efforts to produce its own self-driving technology. Google and Uber ultimately settled for $245m. The employee in question, Anthony Levandowski, was later charged with trade secrets theft and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison, which he did not serve because he was pardoned by former president Donald Trump.

[LeMarchand]

Link: Twitter threatens to sue Meta over rival Threads app | Twitter | The Guardian

 

 

Not a fan of Zuck or Musk, but if you're going to fire a load of staff with no notice and then tell the rest they'll have to work a lot harder then don't be surprised if they start working for a rival.

 

If it's Meta/Facebook I won't use it unless I absolutely need to. I moved from WhatsApp to Signal

 

Is Signal working properly now? We tried a year or two back and messages seemed to take hours (or days) to deliver.

[2ilent8cho]

Is Signal working properly now? We tried a year or two back and messages seemed to take hours (or days) to deliver.

 

Seems to work perfectly for our friend circle group chats, messages come through instantly.

[6Foot2]

That's just weird! By the way, I noticed you mentioned an image (IMG_1445.jpg), but unfortunately, I can't see it here. Anyway, I'm new to this forum, so it's great to connect with you.

 

Reposting that image:

 

 

 

In other news:

 

Link: The web version of Threads is finally here

 

The long-awaited web version of Threads has finally arrived. After announcing that its Twitter competitor would be accessible from browsers earlier this week, Meta’s rollout is finally underway. Instagram head Adam Mosseri confirmed Thursday the update is now live for all users.

 

That means if you’ve been impatiently refreshing threads.net waiting for it to be available, you should check again. Up to now, many Threads users have been frustrated by the lack of a web version. Though it was possible to manually navigate to a specific user’s profile, people have been unable to browse their feeds, post, reply or even log in to their accounts from browsers.

 

As the app has seen a significant drop-off in engagement following its initial launch, many have viewed the lack of a web version as a significant barrier to the app. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Mosseri have been promising a web version was high on their agenda for Threads, though Mosseri recently said the team was working out some bugs with the experience.

 

Now that the web version is finally live, it will be interesting to see which of the many “missing” features Threads will get next. Users have also complained about the lack of content search — right now people can only search for users, not for specific posts — and hashtags, both of which help people discover new content on Instagram and Twitter.

 

One feature, however, that seems unlikely is the addition of DMs. Mosseri has said he’s reluctant to add another inbox to user’s lives, though he recently raised the possibility of incorporating Instagram DMs into the Threads experience. But he did confirm that post-editing features are in the works, so at least Threads users won’t have to wait more than a decade for an edit button.

[6Foot2]

Link: Meta Told to Stop Using Threads Name by Company That Owns UK Trademark

 

• Threads Software Limited and its lawyers wrote to Meta to tell it to stop using the Threads name in the UK.
  
• It's owned the British trademark for Threads since 2012.
  
• And says Meta made four offers to purchase the "threads.app" domain, which it declined.

A British software company is giving Meta 30 days to stop using the name Threads in the UK because it owns the trademark.

 

Threads Software Limited says its lawyers wrote to the Facebook and Instagram parent company on Monday. If Meta doesn't stop using the name Threads, Threads Software Limited says it will seek an injunction from the courts.

 

The British company trademarked Threads in 2012 for its intelligent messaging hub, which can store a company's emails, tweets, and voice over internet protocol phone calls in a cloud database.

 

In a press release, it said it had declined the four offers that Meta's lawyers made to purchase its domain name "threads.app."

 

Then when Meta launched Threads, its social media app designed to compete with Elon Musk's X, the British company says it was removed from Facebook.

 

John Yardley, the managing director of Threads Software Limited, said the business "faces a serious threat from one of the largest technology companies in the world."

 

Meta's app was released in July, shortly after Musk provoked controversy by introducing a temporary limit on how many tweets a user could view.

 

It then beat ChatGPT to become the fastest app to reach 100 million users, doing so in five days. It was helped by the fact that Threads is linked to Instagram.

 

By the end of July, Mark Zuckerberg said more than half of Threads users had stopped using the platform. The app has since introduced new features, and has so far had 120 million active users this month.

 

"We recognize that this is a classic 'David and Goliath' battle with Meta," said Yardley.

 

"And whilst they may think they can use whatever name they want, that does not give them the right to use the Threads brand name."

 

Meta did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.