Threads isn’t the first copycat app from Mark Zuckerberg

When Mark Zuckerberg sees a good idea, he’s not particularly shy about copying it.

From copying Snapchat’s Stories feature to cloning TikTok in the form of Instagram Reels, the Facebook co-founder has a long and well-documented history of copycats.

Zuckerberg’s latest incomplete innovation is Threads, an Instagram-based competitor to Twitter.

News first emerged last month that Instagram parent company Meta was teaming up with a Twitter rival, prompting Twitter owner Elon Musk to launch a cage match against Zuckerberg.

Threads is live now, and Zuckerberg boasted that it had more than 30 million signups in less than a day — in part because of the ease of setting up a profile using an existing Instagram account.

in his first few post On the fledgling app, Zuckerberg said he wanted Threads”Paving the way for 1 billion people,” adding that “Twitter has the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t done it yet. ”

While Zuckerberg said the Threads team was “focused on being nice and making this a friendly place,” he didn’t pretend that Threads was very different from the platform it emulated.

In fact, Zuckerberg even logged into his own Twitter account (which has been dormant since January 2012) to share the popular pointing Spider-Man meme Seems to acknowledge how similar the two platforms actually are.

Meanwhile, Musk responded with a laughing emoji in a tweet, calling Threads a straight copy-paste of Twitter.

“They’re not building anything with the platform,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said of Meta. “It’s just a platform looking to gain market share by taking advantage of Instagram’s massive install base and hiding people’s frustration and hatred towards Musk and Twitter.”

Whether Threads can compete with Twitter remains to be seen. Every imitation product Zuckerberg has launched over the years has been a huge success, but others have failed to gain traction.

“It’s really in the DNA of Zuckerberg and Facebook,” Ives told Make It. “Ultimately, Zuckerberg is just trying to capitalize on other valid ideas in social media to further monetize the install base.”

Other rivals such as Mastodon and Bluesky have yet to replace Twitter, despite the confusion over Musk’s ownership of the app.

“Despite all the setbacks,” Ives said, “many people start their day with coffee, brushing their teeth and checking Twitter.”

Here are some notable copycat apps and features launched under Zuckerberg’s leadership.

Zuckerberg announces Facebook’s move into dating apps In 2018, he promised that Facebook dating “will be used to build real long-term relationships, not just hookups.”

Facebook brings ‘Stories’ to Instagram in one of its most successful instances of feature stealing In 2016, it directly challenged the super popular Snapchat. It also copied Snapchat’s fun face filters. By mid-2018, Instagram Stories had twice as many daily users as Snapchat.

Instagram takes on TikTok in 2020 with Reels, a service for some creators up to $10,000 Post their videos on the app.

Popular Messenger Apps of the Year Give users the ability to edit a message within 15 minutes of sending it — a feature already available on competitors like Telegram and Signal.

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