Elon Musk has asked his staff to ship better features after Twitter's traffic nosedived following Threads' launch. THILINA KALUTHOTAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Elon Musk has asked his staff to ship better features after Twitter’s traffic nosedived following Threads’ launch.
Elon Musk is now pulling up his sleeves to take on Threads after initially making fun of Mark Zuckerberg and hurling insults at him over the launch of Meta Platforms Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) Twitter clone.
Musk tweeted that a new feature is in the works based on user suggestions and feedback. This would be like a newsletter based on a user’s new bookmarks during the week.
Use bookmark button. Coming soon, your week’s bookmarks will be emailed to you per a user’s suggestion.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2023
Musk has asked his employees in an internal memo to “ship better features faster than ever”, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer.
This comes at a time when Meta’s Threads has become the fastest app to reach the 100 million user milestone, crossing the mark in five days of its launch. The previous record was held by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which achieved the record in nearly two months of its launch.
Another likely reason for Musk feeling the heat is Twitter’s traffic taking a nosedive – in the first two days of Threads’ launch, Twitter’s traffic fell by 5% compared to the previous week. On a year-on-year basis, this is a 11% decline.
Musk’s own employees have reportedly said “Threads is just better”.
Since his acquisition of Twitter, Musk has made several mistakes – something that he owned up to in the “All-In Podcast” in December 2022.
Some of his decisions include imposing severe rate limits that locked many users out of Twitter on June 30. Prior to this, Twitter also blocked everyone from reading tweets without logging in to their accounts, breaking tweets embedded on websites.
Musk’s decision to remove legacy blue check marks and giving them to anyone who would pay for Twitter Blue has also not gone down too well with its userbase, apart from being misused by impersonators.
While a weekly newsletter of new bookmarked tweets is a start, it remains to be seen if Musk manages to keep Twitter relevant enough.
Produced in association with Benzinga
Edited by Saba Fatima and Maham Javaid
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