Social platform Threads may only be a couple of days old, but it has already amassed millions of users. While Meta might be celebrating the popularity of its new Twitter rival, the company is also facing criticism from various quarters.

Huge privacy concerns mean that Threads not available in the European Union -- not officially, at least. But there are also complaints that the app has been rushed and feels unfinished. Released in Disability Pride month, one of the biggest complaints leveled at Threads is that it lacks basic accessibility options and features.

For many people the release of Threads, Instagram's text-based conversation app, represents an alternative to Twitter -- a platform which is widely considered to have become more toxic and problematic under Elon Musk. But for an even larger number of people, Threads will be their first step into this type of social media.

Switching from Twitter, Mastodon or Bluesky to Threads -- or using them in conjunction with each other -- is painless, but for anyone who has never used such a platform, the language surrounding it can be slightly mystifying. And this is why Meta has released a Threads Dictionary to bring users up to speed.

Threads, Meta's Twitter alternative, is now live and already proving incredibly popular. It's very much a work in progress, with lots of features missing, but the developers are working hard at bringing these to the app.

One question I've seen asked quite a few times is how to add a second account to Threads, and it's definitely not as obvious as it could be. The process is easy enough though, just follow these steps.

The rocky journey for Twitter continues under Elon Musk, with this weekend seeing bizarre constraints introduced in an attempt to reduce unspecified "data scraping". Users of the service found themselves hit with rate limit warnings as Twitter placed restrictions on the number of tweets that can be viewed each day.

Rival Mastodon has already seen a steady influx of Twitter escapees, and this continued over the weekend with a 300,000 jump in the number of active users; Bluesky is also faring well, to the point that sign-ups have been paused to allow for tweaks and fixes to be implemented to accommodate the levels of interest. But now eyes are turning towards Meta, as the Facebook owner prepares for the launch this Thursday of its own Twitter alternative, Threads by Instagram.

With Apple widely expected to announce its own VR headset next week, Meta has stepped forward to take the wraps off its own next-gen headset.

Meta Quest 3 will debut this fall and be slimmer, more comfortable and significantly more powerful than the Quest 2, with full color passthrough. The new headset will be offer higher resolution, stronger performance and what the company calls "breakthrough Meta Reality technology".

Facebook owner Meta has been fined a record €1.2 billion (around $1.3 billion) by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC). The fine was issued for breaching EU data sharing regulations by failing to sufficiently protect user data.

In addition to the record fine, Meta has been ordered to cease the transfer of user data from the EU to the US for processing within six months. Responding to the demand to stop the "unlawful processing, including storage, in the US" of European user data, Meta points out that it "uses the same legal mechanisms as other organizations" and indicated that it intends to appeal against the ruling.

WhatsApp has long been one of the more secure messaging apps with mass appeal, largely thanks to end-to-end encryption. This has been boosted further by features such as disappearing messages, and now Meta has added Chat Lock.

The company says that the feature "lets you protect your most intimate conversations behind one more layer of security"; what this means in practice is that message can be password or fingerprint protected. But there is more to Chat Lock than this.

WhatsApp is not alone in offering a disappearing message feature. It is an idea that's fairly self-explanatory: messages can be configured to automatically delete after a certain period of time -- something that's ideal for certain sensitive information.

But in a slightly confusing move, WhatsApp is introducing the option to stop disappearing messages from disappearing. The option is called Keep In Chat, and it is being described as "your new sender superpower".

There's probably no one who hasn't heard of ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that can generate human-like responses to text prompts. While it's not without its flaws, ChatGPT is scarily good at being a jack-of-all-trades: it can write software, a film script and everything in between. ChatGPT was built on top of GPT-3.5, OpenAI’s large language model, which was the most advanced at the time of the chatbot's release last November.

Fast forward to March, and OpenAI unveiled GPT-4, an upgrade to GPT-3.5. The new language model is larger and more versatile than its predecessor. Although its capabilities have yet to be fully explored, it is already showing great promise. For example, GPT-4 can suggest new compounds, potentially aiding drug discovery, and create a working website from just a notebook sketch.

While WhatsApp is most commonly used on mobile devices, growing numbers of users are adopting the desktop version of the app. Meta has just announced the release of a significantly improved version of the Windows app.

Speed is a key upgrade here, with load times being reduced, but there are also feature improvements. The latest version of WhatsApp for Windows now supports larger group video and audio calls.

While social media sites like Facebook remain popular, many people have worries about how their data is is being collected and used by the companies behind them.

Bret Cox is founder and CEO of True, a social network which doesn't monetize user information and focuses on people you really know. We talked him to find out more.

The recent big tech layoffs have profoundly impacted industries outside of technology because the sector has long been seen as a driving force for innovation and economic growth. The layoff announcements by companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have raised concerns about the tech industry's future and the ripple effects throughout the economy.

Below are several major tech companies that have laid off employees as they navigate the challenges of a rapidly changing industry:

It is quite some time since Facebook was hit with the "free the nipple" campaign that demanded the company stop censoring or removing images of breastfeeding women. But now Meta is facing new recommendations from its independent Oversight Board to update the Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity Community Standard that it applies to Facebook and Instagram content to ensure it is "governed by clear criteria that respect international human rights standards".

The recommendation comes as the Oversight Board overturned Meta's decisions in 2021 and 2022 to remove content posted by a couple -- one of whom is transgender, the other non-binary -- for violating Sexual Solicitation Community Standards. Meta is criticized for taking a simplistic view of gender, with the Board saying that it is "unclear how the rules apply to intersex, non-binary and transgender people, and requires reviewers to make rapid and subjective assessments of sex and gender, which is not practical when moderating content at scale".

For the last decade the Downdetector site has been providing data on the real-time status and outages of online services.

Ookla, the company behind Downdetector, has released information on the largest outages seen in 2022. While nothing surpassed the biggest outage ever seen, experienced by Meta on October 4, 2021, there have been some significant ones this year.

Some of the biggest names in tech are joining forces to create the Overture Maps Foundation and develop interoperable open map data, and help build a rival to Google Maps.

The group is headed by the Linux Foundation and also included Microsoft, Amazon Web Service, TomTom and Facebook-owner Meta. The aim is to allow companies to contribute their own data to help compile up-to-date map data that "is complete, accurate, and refreshed as the physical world changes".