Update: Threads launched even earlier than previously announced. There is a QR code on the official website that takes you to the app page (there does not appear to be a web client at this time).

First Impressions: Too bad there's no way to prevent people you don't follow from seeing your posts, like there is on Instagram.

Elon Musk's $45 billion acquisition of Twitter is an ongoing circus, with the outspoken billionaire making thousands of staff redundant, re-launching Verify as a paid service, and this weekend, many will be unable to use the site like some Oversaw an IT cock-up of sorts (Mask spun it as deliberate, citing "data scraping"). People leaving Twitter for Mastodon and others have become almost a subclass of posting on the site, while new restrictions continue to grow: most recently, Twitter announced that it will charge for the very popular TweetDeck.

In short, the business titans are trying to retrofit a paid service onto a service that became popular because, among other things, it was free; not to say that there were no problems with Twitter, but whatever it was, it was an open, fully functional platform that anyone could sign up for and use. It was a platform. Mr. Musk is crushing every single thing he can to increase friction and make people pay for something they have been using for free for God knows how long.

Watching all this unfold and figuratively licking his own cheek is Mark Zuckerberg, the pale billionaire founder and CEO of Meta. The parent company of Facebook sees an opportunity in the Twitter mess, and as a competing social media company, it is in a position to seriously challenge Twitter's seeming dominance in online discourse. a Meta executive told Musk that people are looking for "a sane, well-run alternative Emotions surfaced when he said that he was looking for "a means" and Musk and Zuckerberg exchanged posts that promised a literal cage match. All very sane.

Now the meta is ready to put the cat among the pigeons; Twitter's new competitor, dubbed "Threads," will be released tomorrow. Perhaps the main feature, at least initially, will be integration with the existing and very popular Instagram under the Meta umbrella. If that name sounds familiar, that's because Instagram Threads was the old service that Meta mothballed in 2021.

Screenshots of the new thread look incredibly similar to Twitter. It looks so much like Twitter that one wonders if the mask is going to sue, even for laughs.

Meta, of course, calls the app a "text-based conversation app." The store description reads, "Threads is where the community comes together to discuss everything from today's interests to tomorrow's trends."

"Thank goodness they are running so soundly," Musk said in response to a tweet containing the announcement, indicating that he is definitely over that particular insult.

To eat Musk's lunch, Threads is free and places no restrictions on users; Threads is, of course, Meta's modus operandi, siphoning off even the tiniest bit of data about its users to give it an edge in selling them. Not only is Meta greedy for acquisitions, but if it cannot acquire a competitor, it builds an internal version of that competitor: TikTok becomes Facebook Reels, Snapchat becomes Facebook Stories. Most importantly, with Instagram, hundreds of millions of accounts will be connected and ready to go.

The cage match between Musk and Zuckerberg will not happen. Meanwhile, the other made his fortune elsewhere and entered social media believing he could do better. This is a head-to-head battle in which Meta will use its awesome leverage and resources to try to smother its struggling competitors. Regardless of what you think of Mask, I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping that at the very least Zuckerberg gets a bloody nose.