You may soon have the opportunity to play mini games within Threads DMs.

      Meta is trialing casual games aimed at making chats more enjoyable.

      Meta is currently exploring a new method to encourage users to spend additional time on the Threads app. To enhance user engagement, the company is reportedly testing a new feature that could add an element of fun to private conversations.

      As per a recent post on X by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, Meta may soon roll out mini games in Threads DMs. An initial screenshot of the feature shows a basketball-themed game that uses a simple swipe mechanic, permitting users to take shots back and forth with friends while they chat.

      This feature seems to prioritize casual enjoyment over competitive gaming, serving as a light-hearted distraction to help maintain conversations. Though it is still under development and not yet available to the public, the feature indicates Meta’s broader initiative to make Threads more interactive and less reliant on text.

      Since its inception, Threads has gradually integrated new features designed to give it an advantage over the competing platform X. Recently, it was announced that Meta intends to introduce a tool that assists podcast creators in sharing previews on Threads, and now the focus appears to be on features aimed at enhancing daily user engagement.

      Meta has a history of trialing games in DMs.

      According to TechCrunch, this is not the first instance of Meta testing games within DMs. Last year, the firm introduced a hidden emoji game in Instagram DMs with the goal of keeping an emoji bouncing for as long as possible using a paddle at the screen's bottom.

      At this moment, Meta has not released an official statement regarding this discovery, and it remains uncertain when the game might be available in Threads DMs, if ever. It is also not clear if the basketball game will be the sole option or if users will have a selection of different games to choose from.

      ---

      X is experiencing another outage.

      Update: It seems that the recent X outage affecting users in the U.S. has been resolved. Reports of service issues on Downdetector.com have decreased from nearly twenty thousand to just over a hundred as of 10:50 am PT. The official X Developer Platform Status page still indicates that all services are operating normally with no incident history in the past 24 hours. The original report follows:

      Just days after a disruption caused by Cloudflare impacted X and several other websites, the platform is facing another service outage. At the time of writing, thousands of users have reported that the app and website are not functioning correctly for them.

      ---

      X’s new “Based in” labels could alter your feed.

      What has occurred? X is launching a new feature titled “About This Account” that incorporates a publicly visible “Based in” label on user profiles. Early users of the update have observed it appearing on various accounts, marking a significant move towards explicit location transparency on a larger scale. Although X had previously hinted at testing credibility tools, this step directly connects accounts with their claimed regions.

      The label appears close to the bio, displaying country-level information such as “Based in India” or “Based in the United States.”

      ---

      A new Chrome extension simplifies trust in your X feed.

      What has occurred? X has recently included a “Based in” field, allowing users to see the location of a profile. Following this, independent developer Rhys Sullivan has created a Chrome extension that takes these profile labels and displays them as small national flags directly in the feed, eliminating the need to view a profile to determine an account’s country. The extension operates by calling X’s API endpoints from the browser while logged in.

      It identifies usernames on a feed page and subsequently calls X’s GraphQL AboutAccountQuery to retrieve the account_based_in field.