Team News

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said his new social media app, Threads, is attracting more users than he expected.

The app attracted more than 100 million signups within days of its launch this month in a challenge to Elon Musk’s rival platform X, formerly Twitter.

But analysts questioned whether Threads would be able to keep people engaged.

External data firms have reported that registrations and time spent on the platform have declined since launch.

Zuckerberg said the initial success had surprised executives and “we’re seeing more people coming back every day than I expected.”

He said that improving this engagement was the focus of the company now and success was not a “fore-gone”.

“We have a lot of work to do to make Threads reach its full potential,” he said.

His remarks came as Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, reported rising ad sales and steady user growth, with 3.07 billion people globally active on one of its apps every day.

The earnings suggest Meta is emerging from last year’s slump, when ad sales fell in the face of increased competition, Apple’s privacy changes and general economic weakness.

Meta said it hit $32 billion in ad sales in the April-June period, up 11% from a year earlier. That was better than analysts expected, with growth accelerating from the previous quarter. Profits rose even faster, rising 16% year over year to $7.79 billion.

The results helped lift the firm’s shares in after-hours trading. The share price has already more than doubled since the start of the year as investors embrace Zuckerberg’s campaign to cut costs and refocus the tech giant.

Meta said it employed about 71,469 people at the end of June, down 14% from a year ago. He said the figure only reflected the impact of about half a thousand layoffs he has announced in recent months.

“There’s a lot to feel good about when it comes to Meta right now,” said Insider Intelligence principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

She said the company still had to navigate a weak advertising market and stiff competition in advertising and artificial intelligence. Its investments in virtual reality have also yet to pay off.

“These things will weigh on Meta in the second half of the year, but thanks to the moment… it will be in a stronger position to face these challenges,” she said.

Chinese-owned video streaming app TikTok says it will offer text-only posts as competition between social media giants heats up.

The platform says the new feature gives users “another way to express themselves.”

Earlier this month, TikTok launched a new music streaming service to rival platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

And on Monday, Elon Musk’s Twitter ditched the famous blue bird logo and switched to a black and white X.

TikTok users will now be given three options in the app – whether to post photos, videos or text.

They will also be able to personalize posts by adding sound, location or Duets, which are video reactions to other TikTok users’ posts.

“These features make your text posts just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post,” TikTok said.

TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, recently launched a new music streaming service, TikTok Music, in Brazil and Indonesia.

Last week, the company also released a beta version of the service in Singapore, Mexico and Australia.

A spokesperson said it will allow users to “listen, share and download music they’ve discovered on TikTok, and share their favorite songs and artists with their TikTok community.”

The app is testing other features, including a new landscape mode with selected users around the world.

In 2021, TikTok became the most popular online destination in the world after having more visits than the American search engine giant Google.

That year, the app also said it had more than a billion active users worldwide.

Competition between rival social media firms – such as Instagram owner Meta and X, Mr Musk’s rebranded Twitter platform – has heated up in recent weeks.

This month, Meta’s new Threads platform launched in the Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries, including the UK.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later said his company’s Threads platform had signed up more than 100 million users in less than five days.

Also this week, Twitter’s blue bird branding was replaced by a logo with a white X on a black background.

The term tweet will also be changed to “x’s”, according to Musk.

How do we experience the whole future amid grief and the loss of our dearest people?

An artificial intelligence (AI) company called “You, Only Virtual” is creating a chatbot modeled after our loved ones who are no longer alive, with its founder, Justin Harrison, telling “Good Morning America” ​​that he hopes people don’t have to grieve at all.

“You, Only Virtual” scans text messages, emails and phone calls shared between an individual and the deceased to create a chatbot that composes original written or audio responses imitating the deceased person’s voice and modeling the relationship and rapport the two shared in real life.

The company, founded in 2020, hopes to offer a video-chat option later this year and eventually offer augmented reality that allows interaction with a three-dimensional projection.

Harrison, who used the technology to create “a virtual mother” after his mother’s death, dismissed potential privacy concerns raised by using personal conversations to build a chatbot without the consent of the deceased.

“You absolutely do not need the consent of someone who is dead,” he said. “My mom might have hated the idea, but this is what I wanted and I’m alive,” he emphasizes.