The Know Daily - Tuesday 4 July 2023

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Conservationists have celebrated the birth of a critically-endangered Bornean orangutanat Blackpool Zoo - the first to be born there in 20 years - as part of the European Endangered Species Programme. The baby’s mother lives in a specially designed facility along with four other Bornean orangutans, which are at high risk of extinction in the wild.

🐦 Threads vs. Twitter

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is poised to launch a new app to rival Twitter, with Threads set to go live this Thursday.

What do we know about the app?
Threads is available for pre-order on Apple’s App Store, where screengrabs show a dashboard which looks remarkably similar to Twitter’s.

Meta refers to Threads, which will be linked to Instagram and appears to be a free service, as a “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,” reads the App Store description.

Why is Threads a big deal?
Several Twitter competitors - including Mastodon and Bluesky - have sprung up in recent years. But the BBC’s North America technology reporter James Clayton has suggested that “Threads could be the biggest threat faced by Twitter to date”.

“[Meta boss] Mark Zuckerberg has a history of borrowing other company’s ideas - and making them work,” Clayton added, pointing out that Reels is widely seen as a TikTok copy, while Stories resembles Snapchat.

What does this mean for Twitter?
Meta’s announcement comes at a time when more and more Twitter users are becoming frustrated by changes to the platform which have been introduced since Tesla boss Elon Musk took over last October.

On Saturday, Twitter restricted the number of tweets that users could see. The company has also said that the user dashboard TweetDeck - popular among journalists and social media professionals - will soon go behind a paywall.

Meta’s move will only intensify the rivalry between multi-billionaires Zuckerbeg and Musk, who agreed to a cage fight last month - though it is unclear how serious they actually were.