Meta’s Twitter Alternative Threads Is Finally Headed to Desktop
Threads fans, it’s time to celebrate: the Twitter alternative will soon be available for use from a desktop computer for everyone. It’s not clear exactly when all users will be able to access Threads.net via desktop, but today a representative for the company told Mashable that “we’ll begin rolling out the feature over the next few days.”
The news comes a month after reports indicated that despite its successful launch, Threads has lost about half of its original users. At a company town hall on July 27, Mark Zuckerberg described the loss as “not perfect.”
He added, “Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet.”
The desktop version of Threads isn’t the only change that the company has planned. At the same town hall, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox explained that soon, users on Instagram will see “important Threads” in the app.
The meeting came one day after Threads reported an increase in revenue derived from ads, though the company also predicted that its expenses will rise in 2023 and 2024. Zuckerberg said, “We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I’ve seen in a while with Llama 2, Threads, Reels, new AI products in the pipeline, and the launch of Quest 3 this fall.”
Earlier in July, Similarweb shared statistics that showed that on its busiest day, the daily active users on Threads totaled around 45% of the daily active users on Twitter. On July 7, usage of Threads in the United States was approximately 21 minutes, but a week later had fallen to just over 6 minutes.
Additionally, on July 21 The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of daily active users had fallen 70% since the app’s launch.
Prior to the launch of Threads, news that Meta was working on a Twitter alternative bothered Elon Musk enough that while talking big to some of his fans on Twitter (now rebranded as X), he claimed he’d be happy to fight Mark Zuckerberg in a mixed martial arts style fight.
Zuckerberg called Musk’s bluff and for more than a month Musk made a show of hyping the fight up. Amid this, the early success of Threads clearly rattled the Tesla owner, who at one point insulted Zuckerberg using the right wing term “cuck.”
But Musk also kept insisting the fight would happen, even as it became apparent he was constantly changing goal posts — and making claims about the bout that weren’t actually true. A week ago, Zuckerberg declared Musk wasn’t serious and said the fight wouldn’t happen.
The post Meta’s Twitter Alternative Threads Is Finally Headed to Desktop appeared first on TheWrap.
