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As the Twitter-like social network Bluesky sees a significant surge in users this month, Meta’s own X competitor Threads has been rapidly building out its platform. On Friday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that Threads will start testing AI-powered summaries of what people are discussing on the platform in the app’s “Trending now” section in the U.S.
The new addition sounds similar to X’s Stories feature, which uses Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to summarize trending topics in the social network’s Explore section.
Threads is also going to test an expanded set of trending topics, the company noted. Plus, users will now be able to search within a specific date range and search for posts from an individual account.
In a post on Threads, Mosseri said the new additions are “long-overdue improvements to Search and Trending Now on Threads.”
Meta has been moving quickly to update Threads at a time when many X users are moving to Bluesky, which has now surpassed 20 million users. The platform has seen an increase in users following the U.S. presidential election as X gained more of a right-wing approach, especially after Musk used the social network to campaign for President-elect Donald Trump.
After complaints from users regarding Threads’ algorithm, the platform is now embracing feedback, as it rolled out changes this week to surface more content from people you follow in the app’s algorithmic feed.
Earlier this week, the social network rolled out custom feeds to allow Threads users to curate feeds around specific topics or certain user profiles. The tool allows Threads to compete with Bluesky’s own features that let users build their own algorithms, feeds, and lists.
It’s worth noting that Threads’ user base is still much larger than Bluesky’s as it has more than 275 million monthly active users. However, data from market intelligence firm Simiarweb shows that Bluesky is catching up with Threads when it comes to daily active users. The firm believes that if the social network is able to keep up its current growth rate, it could eventually catch up with Threads.
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Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University.
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