What is Twitter Blue? Memes galore as platform launches subscription service
Twitter is the latest to get into the massive money-making subscription game with Twitter Blue. The social-media giant has officially launched Blue in select countries like Australia and Canada on June 3.
After over five months, on November 9, Twitter has brought Blue subscription to its home country, the USA and New Zealand. At the time of launch, Twitter Blue was only available on iOS devices. However, as of Tuesday, the service was also available on Android devices.
As per a press release by Senior Director of Product Management Sara Beykpour and Staff Product Manager Smita Gupta explained,
“This subscription offering is simply meant to add enhanced and complementary features to the already existing Twitter experience for those who want it.”
What additional features will Twitter Blue have?
As mentioned before, the Twitter Blue subscription will have some exclusive features on top of the vanilla Twitter platform. These features include:
Bookmark folders
This new feature will aggregate the content that the user has bookmarked into customizable categories and color labels.
Reader mode
Twitter has finally paid heed to its users’ attention span and the readability of Twitter threads. The ‘Reading Mode’ will make the content easy to read and comprehend. Twitter will automatically stitch the tweets of a thread together and add some minor reformatting to boost readability.
Top articles
Users will be able to view the most tweeted articles in their feed easily. This section will curate the top articles shared in a user’s network within 24 hours.
Custom navigation panel
The Twitter Blue subscription will also allow subscribers to edit the icon list on the navigation panel at the bottom of the app. Users can choose between five more navigation options barring ‘Home,’ which is locked.
The options include:
- Top Articles
- Spaces
- Communities
- Notifications
- Messages
- Bookmarks
- Profile
- Twitter Blue
Other customization options include a customizable app logo on the home screen, as well as colored themes.
Ad-free news reading
The social media giant has partnered with news agencies and publications to offer an ad-free news experience for these particular websites, which can be accessed via Twitter. These publications currently include:
- The Washington Post
- L.A. Times
- USA TODAY
- The Atlantic
- Reuters
- The Daily Beast
- Rolling Stone
- BuzzFeed
- Insider
- The Hollywood Reporter
According to Twitter’s press release,
“In continuing our commitment to strengthen and support publishers and a free press, a portion of the revenue from Twitter Blue subscription fees goes directly to publishers within our network.”
They added,
“Our goal is to help each publishing partner make 50% more per person than they would’ve made from serving ads to that person.”
Tweets can finally be deleted (sort of)
The most important feature of Twitter Blue is that it perhaps finally gives its subscribers the ability to ‘undo’ Tweets.
However, this comes with a caveat. The tweets can only be deleted within 30-seconds of posting.
Other features include longer video uploads and pinned conversations.
Pricing
The service is available for a monthly fee of $3.49 CAD in Canada or $4.49 AUD in the Australian region. Meanwhile, Twitter Blue is available for $2.99/month in the USA and $4.49/month in New Zealand.
Here’s how Twitteratis reacted to the new service
As expected, Twitter users employed memes to target Twitter while criticizing the paid subscription. Meanwhile, a few praised the platform for introducing the new features.
Twitter has also announced in its press release that they are working on adding even more exclusive features in the future.
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Siddharth Satish