Zuckerberg's company. Meta has launched its new APP that's expected
to compete with Twitter, which is faced backlash under the ownership
of Elon Musk. The text based APP, known as threads looks nearly identical
to Twitter and has seen more than 30 million users sign up since
yesterday's launch. Mike Isaac is a technology reporter for The New
York Times, and he's been covering it all, Mike welcome. And thanks
for joining us 30 Million sign ups as of noon today was that to be
expected, or does that number surprise you? It's certainly surprised
me. It's even really surprised Mark Zuckerberg, who woke up this
morning and around eight AM posted 30 million, and last night he
was posting every couple of hours, basically as the numbers of users
ticked up, so I think even inside of Instagram, Facebook and Meta,
they're really surprised at how quickly people are embracing the
app. So I think you've been testing out the new app as as have I
many other people to. What do you think? How is threads going to
compete with Twitter? Yeah, I mean, the sort of simplicity of it
in that It is basically the exact same thing as Twitter. I think
really helps the product just because folks have been really upset
by a lot of the changes that Elon Musk has made to Twitter since
he bought it last year. And they basically wanted another Twitter
but not owned by Elon Musk, and this also lets you Import the graph
of people that you follow on instagram over to the new APP, which
basically makes it up, making it easy to get up and going right away.
Instead of having to follow a bunch of people right off the bat,
and the functionality is basically the same. Right. It's text based.
You have still have a scrolling feed. You can post videos and pictures
to But what about the timing, Mike? Why now? Why is Mark Zuckerberg?
Going into Twitter's territory right now. Sure, you know, Frankly,
I think it's because Mark since his weakness and there is weakness,
you know, since Ellen must took over Twitter has made a number of
strategic and business missteps. Last weekend over the long holiday
weekend, he took Twitter offline for a lot of people, and basically
the apps stopped working and You know, we were talking to the head
of Instagram yesterday and are reporting basically said that they
started developing the app inside of Meta last winter when they saw
that Twitter was really in tumult and Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg
intensely competitive, and they would they want to gain as much territory
as they can, and they saw that Twitter gave them an opportunity to
do so. So in terms of a response from Elon Musk, there's some reporting
that Twitter's threatening to now sue Meta over thread sending Zuckerberg
a cease and desist letter. We know musk has been Tweeting about this
this afternoon. He tweeted this saying competition is fine. Cheating
is not Mike. What is all this? Tell you about how Elon Musk views
this competitor. Yeah, he is not happy for sure. He, uh, has been
basically pushing back trying to get folks who are quote unquote,
scraping Twitter data or using it to build other apps and services
and I would take the threat of legal action Pretty real from him.
He likes going to court and using you know his advantage and having
billions of dollars to tangle things up in litigation is a real thing
that said he has a pretty formidable opponent in Meta and Facebook.
Look which is also got very deep pockets and is willing to go to
battle over this. As they said before that the suit they believe
is baseless. You cannot separate these apps from the men in charge.
You have two tech giants here in Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. They've
engaged as you mentioned in their own personal feud online, even
threatening to physically fight one another. How does all of this
competition factor into these business decisions right now?
No, You're exactly right. I think just as much as involved as there
is business strategy, But I do think that we're in a really interesting
and difficult time in social media. And there was an assumption for
a long time that Facebook kind of owned it all. But it feels more
up for grabs in a lot of ways. That probably wasn't true a few years
ago, so you see You know, Twitter, sort of on the ropes, medical,
creating new abs, different startups like you know, Blue Sky mastodon
spill. There's a bunch of different companies that feel like there's
an opportunity here and at the helm of almost all of these. You have
either the billionaires of the world controlling them or would be
entrants from little startups that feel like they can break in from
like, be real, which is another one. So everything feels very up
for grabs and up in the air and Way that that's pretty exciting and
hasn't been like this in a while. We'll see what happens next. That
is Mike Isaac Technology reporter from The New York Times joining
us tonight, Mike. Thank you. Good to see you. Thanks for having me.