Meta developed a standalone app in a “reply to Twitter” during a company-wide meeting, and a top executive at Facebook’s parent company has already teased Twitter chief Elon Musk that the next rival will be “run healthy way”.
The app, internally codenamed Project 92, will launch via Instagram and is rumored to be called Threads upon launch, according to The Verge.
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The upcoming app was demonstrated during an all-hands meeting on Thursday led by Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, who called the project “our answer to Twitter,” the agency said.
Cox is already criticizing Musk and his handling of Twitter, which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO bought in October for $44 billion and has since touted itself as “a place where all voices are heard”.
“We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is run sensibly, that they believe they can trust and rely on for distribution,” Cox said during the meeting, according to The Verge.
He said the goal of coding the app, which he started in January, was to ensure creators have a “stable place to build and grow their audience”, creating a platform with a focus on “security, ease of use [e] reliability.”
Cox even bragged about the celebrities who have already committed to using the app, such as Oprah, the Dalai Lama and DJ Slime.
Meta will make the app available “as soon as we can,” Cox added.
Project 92 reportedly uses Instagram’s account system to auto-populate users’ information and integrates with ActivityPub so users of the new app can take their accounts and followers with them to other apps supported by the decentralized social networking protocol.
The integration inherently makes the app decentralized — like Twitter rival Mastodon launched in April and supports independent servers that make their own rules about things like content moderation.
It will be the first interconnected platform of its kind under Mark Zuckerberg’s platform umbrella, which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The upcoming app could have an edge on Twitter because of its alliance with Instagram, which could allow it to take advantage of the photo-sharing app’s 1 billion+ users, according to Statista.
Twitter, meanwhile, has about 360 million users and has been rife with controversy since Musk took over as boss, cut half the company’s workforce, chased advertisers off the platform and outraged high-profile users. who made the blue check a payment to play. resource.
As of April, users who previously had their identity verified by a free blue check that distinguished them from imposters are now required to pay a monthly fee to maintain their prized badge. The cost of a blue checkmark now ranges from $8 per month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 per month for an organization.
More recently, Musk found someone to succeed him: NBCUniversal recruit Linda Yaccarino. It will be tasked with sustaining ad revenue that is reportedly down 59% this year and will have to struggle to meet sales projections – which the struggling company often falls short of, sometimes by as much as 30%.
Yaccarino took over on Monday – weeks earlier than expected – and has already begun to build a credible “herd”, starting with former colleague Joe Benarroch, who has taken on a senior business operations role.
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