Welcome back to Sunday Rundown #90 🙂 Sit back and relax as we share with you the latest news from the digital world!
Instagram’s Twitter competitor launches on July 6th
The Twitter competitor from Meta, Instagram Threads, is expected to launch on July 6th, according to the App Store listing for the app showing a version ready for Apple’s iPhone. Sleuths have also spotted what appears to be an early listing on the Google Play Store, which originally showed up over the weekend.
Meta has also added a launch date teaser to the Instagram app. Typing “threads” into the search box (or a number of other keywords) causes a ticket icon to appear on the search bar. Tap it and a spinning ticket appears to show your Instagram username alongside a local launch time translated from 10AM ET on the 6th. The spinning ticket also includes a QR code that links to Threads.net, seemingly the new social media platform’s web portal. Here, you’ll see a countdown timer that’s also due to end at 10AM ET on the 6th.
Here is the official — and brief — description of the app, from the App Store:
Say more with Threads — Instagram’s text-based conversation app
Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.
TweetDeck suffers as Musk enforces read limits on Twitter
Over the weekend, Elon Musk limited the number of tweets users can read in a day, which he said was to prevent data scraping. While this measure has affected all Twitter users, TweetDeck users, in particular, are today reporting major problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load.
Musk initially enforced read limits of 6,000 daily posts for verified users and 600 daily posts for unverified users. Hours later, he increased these limits to 10,000 tweets and 1,000 tweets, respectively. Given that TweetDeck loads up multiple tweets through various columns simultaneously, it’s likely that the effects of the read restrictions are amplified within TweetDeck.
Twitter’s Google rankings plummet following actions by Elon Musk
Twitter’s search visibility on Google fell by 32% in a single day, according to Sistrix, following actions taken by CEO Elon Musk to limit tweet views. Google’s search crawlers were affected by these limits, resulting in Twitter losing over 2200 keywords from page one of Google. But Twitter is starting to bounce back.
According to data from Sistrix, Twitter’s visibility in Google search results increased by 18% over the last day. The boost happened right after Twitter stopped forcing people to log in to see tweets. CEO Elon Musk temporarily implemented the login rule to stop data scraping. However, the rule unintentionally blocked Google’s search crawlers, and Twitter’s search visibility tanked.
Bonus links
- Inside Google’s big AI shuffle — and how it plans to stay competitive, with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis
- Microsoft Launches Free AI Training With Professional Certificate
- 5 LinkedIn InMail Best Practices to Generate New Business Prospects [Infographic]
- The biggest rebrands and refreshes of 2023 so far
Thank you for taking the time to read our Sunday Rundown #90. If you have a story that you want to see in this series, reply to us below or contact us.