I don’t know whether Twitter usage is increasing - though I definitely don’t believe that it’s growing at the rate that Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed. And I don’t know whether Meta’s soon-to-be-released Twitter competitor app will gain traction, though I do know that it’s already failed once with basically the same idea.
But this does look set to be the next big social media battleground, both literally and figuratively, as Meta seeks to capitalize on user unrest as a result of Musk’s changes at Twitter, with the launch of its new P92/Barcelona/Threads app coming very soon, according to latest reports and insight.
As shared by Alex Heath in his Command Line newsletter, Meta’s looking to launch P92 sometime next month, providing a new, real-time text app, built on the back of Instagram’s network graph.
As per Heath: “The new, text-based app, dubbed Project 92 internally, and potentially Threads externally, is currently planned to come out in mid-July, according to people familiar with the plan. The app is going to be promoted inside Instagram, giving it a massive source of distribution on day one, and people will be able to auto-fill it with their Instagram account info to quickly get started.”
Heath further notes that Meta’s hoping to reach ‘tens of millions’ of users within the first few months of the app becoming available to the public.
Which could pose a significant threat to Twitter, which itself currently serves around 250 million active users. Though that figure is speculative. Before purchasing Twitter, and in an effort to wriggle out of his $44 billion takeover offer, Elon Musk claimed that around 20% of Twitter profiles were actually bots, and that Twitter was inflating its actual user stats in order to appease market analysts. Yet, as soon as he took ownership of the app, Elon seemed to forget about all of this entirely, and Twitter suddenly added many millions more totally human users.
But that does seem pretty convenient, and if Musk’s bot estimates were correct, pretty astounding, in terms of growth. At a 20% reduction in Twitter’s mDAU count, that would mean that Twitter had around 190 million actual human daily active users when Musk took over at the app. It now, according to its own reporting, has 250m actives – so Twitter, if these numbers are to be believed, has added 60 million users over the last six months.
That’s about three times Twitter’s previous fastest growth rate, which would be an amazing growth story, but as noted, one that I’d be a little skeptical about, given the surrounding discussion.
Yet even taking Twitter at its word, Instagram could still pose a real threat.
