Meta’s text-based conversation app Threads has more than 150 million monthly active users, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said, highlighting the growth witnessed by the app designed to challenge Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter.
The number is up from over 130 million in February and about 100 million users in October.
"(Threads) continues to be on the trajectory that I hope to see," Zuckerberg said on April 24 during the company's earnings call.
The Meta chief said in July that he expected Threads to become the next billion-user social network in its suite of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Read: Meta to spend billions more on AI; CEO Mark Zuckerberg vows long-term gains
Threads is among several services such as Mastodon and Bluesky looking to capitalise on the increasing trend of X users looking to migrate to alternative platforms, as the social media platform struggles to cope with the chaos caused under Musk’s ownership.
Since Threads debuted in July 2023, Meta has been building a range of features to attract people onto its platform. This includes a fully functional web application, keyword search, trending topics, edit button, voice posts, and the ability to support multiple accounts.
The company has also been promoting posts from Threads on its video and photo-sharing app Instagram, which likely contributed to the social network's growth.
Global pop sensation Taylor Swift also joined the platform last week to promote her latest album.
Casting Threads wide
In March, Meta took a major step towards delivering on its promise to make Threads interoperable. It started allowing users in countries such as the United States, Canada, and Japan to share their posts to the fediverse.
The fediverse is a group of decentralised social networks, including Mastodon, which can communicate with each other through the ActivityPub protocol.
The feature will be available to all users with public profiles above the age of 18 in these countries.
Threads will be Meta's first app compatible with rival services. It will enable users to interact with a broader community beyond the app's user base and also have the option to transfer content to another service in the future.
Read: Meta to soon suspend political content recommendations on Threads
Meta is also testing a Threads API to enable creators, developers and brands build their own unique integrations, manage their Threads presence at scale, and share fresh, new content with their communities.
Through this API, Meta enables developers to authenticate, publish posts, and fetch their own content. The company also recently added reply management capabilities, allowing people to retrieve replies to their posts, set reply controls and hide or unhide specific replies.
"Insights are one of our top requested features for the API, so we are making it possible for people to fetch key metrics for their posts, including the number of likes or views. We are also working on webhooks, which will allow developers to receive real-time notifications when certain events occur on the platform, such as a reply to a given post" the company said in a blogpost earlier this month.
Meta said it is working with a few partners such as Grabyo, Hootsuite, Social News Desk, Sprinklr, Sprout Social and Techmeme at present, with plans to make the API broadly available by the end of June.
On April 24, Threads said it started testing a feature that gives select users an option to manually or auto-archive posts after a certain period of time.
Recent estimates from app analytics firm Apptopia indicated that Threads now has more daily active users in the United States than X, Business Insider reported.
Overall, Meta said that about 3.24 billion people are using at least one of the company's applications on a daily basis, registering an increase of 7 percent year-on-year.
The social networking giant is also betting big on generative artificial intelligence. The company recently introduced a new version of its AI chatbot Meta AI, powered by the company's latest large language model Llama 3.
The chatbot was made available across the company's suite of apps including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger and hardware such as Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Meta is however yet to integrate any of its generative AI features into Threads.
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