"Competition is good, and cheating is not," was Elon Musk's response, owner of Twitter, to the news of the launch of Instagram's Threads site, which has had a huge surge, reaching over 80 million subscribers worldwide within just 48 hours, and outside the European continent.

Experts point out that linking the new application to Instagram helped garner this large number of accounts, especially as the Threads application allows the transfer of all Instagram followers to Threads. One of the first drawbacks related to the new application is that the account can only be suspended, and deleting the account from the application automatically means deleting the account on Instagram, which is a nuisance to some users.

But the main question here is: What is Threads app, and what is its impact on Twitter?

The Threads app was created by the Instagram team, and posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, pictures, and video clips up to 5 minutes long, as announced by Meta. Therefore, the application is similar to Twitter in the services it provides and exceeds it in some aspects, where the length of a post on Twitter is up to 280 characters, and the videos presented do not exceed two minutes only.

Compared to Twitter, the first version of Threads did not support direct messaging between individuals and also does not support trending topics or hashtags, while both applications are similar in not allowing the modification and addition to posts.

In this context, Twitter's lawyer Alex Spiro sent a message to Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Meta, accusing him of "illegal practices" for using Twitter's secrets and demanding he stop using trade secrets or confidential information from Twitter by relying on former Twitter employees to create the application. Meta responded to these accusations stating that it did not rely on former Twitter employees.

A drawback of Threads so far is that despite the large number of accounts that have joined the app rapidly, it still suffers from a lack of identity for users, and there are a large number of posts from individuals just for the sake of presence without a different function or goal from the app, which could indicate that it is merely a "bubble" and will disappear soon or people will turn away from it.

Despite Meta's announcement that it represents the future of the internet by making "topics" compatible with open, interoperable social networks, so far it does not seem that there is any compatibility or even a clear goal from the app according to a large number of users.

In summary, given the large role that social media sites play in our lives, there are several questions that Meta needs to answer: What is the need to launch this application? What will it add to the world of social media? Is Threads a continuation of the ongoing dispute between Musk, owner of Twitter, and Zuckerberg, owner of Meta? Is this application with its huge amount of users in the first hours of the app's launch considered a success?

From my perspective, I see that the application in its current form is not beneficial, and that Threads creates more distraction for users and media without clear purpose.. Let's wait and see what Meta will do to maintain its latest releases, and what steps Twitter will take to counter the new application, and whether there will be new applications from Elon Musk's side and we enter a war between social media giants, the only losers of which are the audience of these applications?