Following several rumours over the last few months, Twitter revealed that it is indeed launching a subscription service. It’s calling the offer, Twitter Blue.
To allay any fears that the free version of Twitter is going away, it’s not. As Twitter itself says, Twitter Blue is meant to enhance the experience for users who tweet a lot or as it terms them, power users.
For now Twitter Blue is only available in Australia and Canada for AUD$4.49 and CAD$3.49 respectively.
What do you get for that money? Not much if we’re honest.
The first feature Twitter highlights is a Bookmark Folder which is rather simply described as, “Bookmark Folders let you organize the Tweets you’ve saved by letting you manage content so when you need it, you can find it easily and efficiently.”
So is this like the Liked Tweets tab on steroids? The image below shows and example, but it’s not clear what you can do. Are you simply able to save tweets to a different folder rather than liking a tweet? It’s not clear to be frank.
Then there is the Undo Tweet feature which gives you up to 30 seconds to Undo a tweet before it is posted to your timeline whether it be a reply or an addition to a thread.
Could you just delete the content immediately after posting it for free? Sure.
Finally we have Reader Mode which does what the Thread Reader App does for free but now you get to pay Twitter.
“Reader Mode provides a more beautiful reading experience by getting rid of the noise. We are making it easier for you to keep up with long threads on Twitter by turning them into easy-to-read text so you can read all the latest content seamlessly,” writes the social network.
But wait, there is more!
“Subscribers will also get access to perks, such as customisable app icons for their device’s home screen and fun color themes for their Twitter app, and will have access to dedicated subscription customer support,” says Twitter.
The customer support is cool but we suspect it will be regarding payment issues and the like rather than, you know, asking for Twitter to address something serious like targeted racism, harassment and other ills on the platform.
What got us guffawing in the office was the section of the press release regarding who informed these decisions.
“Our very own power Twitter community” is said to have helped inform these features which would be great if two of the three accounts Twitter mentioned didn’t feature a combined 567 followers. We don’t think that really defines a “power user” but that’s just us.
As for advertising, it isn’t mentioned in the press release so we suspect Twitter is using the DStv model. What we mean to say is that you’ll likely start seeing ads for Twitter Blue while using Twitter Blue seeing as “removing advertising” isn’t one of the marquee features here.
Hopefully Twitter can build out Blue with a more robust feature set in the coming months because right now we’re going to stick with the free version of Twitter.
[Source – Twitter]
