Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads rolled out a chronological newsfeed for its users on Tuesday – debuting the much-requested feature amid rival Elon Musk’s controversial Twitter rebrand.
Beginning this week, Threads will let users sort and view their app in a chronological format based on the accounts they follow or in the original, algorithmically driven “For You” feed, which features a mixture of followed and recommended accounts.
“Ask and you shall receive,” Zuckerberg wrote Tuesday in a Threads post responding to a user who had requested the feature.
“We heard ya. We’re introducing a few new Threads features this week,” added the official Threads account in a separate post.
The updates to Threads surfaced just two days after Musk stunned Twitter users by nixing the platform’s globally recognized blue bird logo in favor of a simple black-and-white “X.” The decision also raised eyebrows among marketing experts who suggested it could further spook wary advertisers.
Musk, whose erratic leadership has drawn scrutiny in recent months, argued the change was necessary to reflect a long-term goal of turning Twitter into an “everything app.”
“This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing,” Musk wrote Monday. “The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.”
“In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world,” he added. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.”
Musk has informed advertisers he plans to cut prices to woo brands back to the platform, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The site formerly known as Twitter is offering new incentives on certain ad formats in the US and UK and warning brands that they will lose their verified status unless they reach certain spending thresholds, the outlet reporting, citing emails sent this week to advertisers and viewed by the Journal.
Threads has emerged as the most significant challenge to Twitter’s text-based social media dominance on record since its debut earlier this month.
The Instagram-linked app has already garnered more than 150 million users, though it has contended with sagging usage since its red-hot launch.
The lack of a chronological feed was one of the most consistent early criticisms of Threads’ user experience.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri had previously indicated that the feature would be introduced in the near future.
The tech billionaires have been escalating their feud even before Zuckerberg launched his “Twitter-killer” app, with Musk challenging the Meta boss to a cage match.
The latest addition to Threads’ platform could further inflame Musk’s outrage over the app’s similarities to Twitter, which had already prompted threats of legal action.
Twitter also allows users to sort their feeds according to a “For You” and “Following” tab.
Threads detailed a number of other new features set to launch on the app, including language translations for posts, an ability to filter notifications in a user’s activity feed according to follows, quotes and reposts, an improved follow button and an “approve all” option for follow requests.
Zuckerberg also wrote that a web version of Threads was “coming too,” though he did not indicate a timeline for its launch.
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