Twitter has confirmed its payment service Twitter Blue, which provides additional features to those found in the free version since Thursday has begun to be available for users in Australia and Canada.
Twitter Blue is the company’s response to those users who “use Twitter a lot” and demanded “powerful features” that meet their needs. With this paid service, it offers “exclusive features and benefits” that will take the social network experience “to the next level.”
This has been stated by Twitter in a statement on its official blog, where it clarifies that the subscription “adds improved and complementary features” to the existing experience on Twitter and that at no time will the free version disappear.
Twitter Blue is a voluntary payment service, which can be found in Canada and Australia as of this Thursday, as part of the first phase of deployment that seeks to know the opinion of users. In these countries, it costs C $ 3.49 and AU $4.49, respectively.
The service offers functions such as bookmark folders, to save and manage tweets; undo ‘tweet’, which establishes a 30-second window of time to review the ‘tweet’ in a preview and modify it before finally publishing it; and a read mode, which converts threads into “easy-to-read text”.
Along with these functions, which had already been advanced by the developer Jane Manchun Wong, the subscription will allow you to customize the application icon or choose a color theme for the social network, and access a customer help service.
Twitter is also preparing new ‘premium’ subscriptions in which users of the platform pay to access exclusive features, and the company has confirmed that after testing this feature, it plans to launch it worldwide.
At the moment the new features were announced only as test features to develop a new business model, but now Twitter has attended the JP Morgan Technologies, Media and Communications conference, and provided more details on its new payment features. .
Twitter CFO Ned Segal acknowledged that currently “advertising accounts for 85 percent of the benefits” of the platform, but that they hope to have a “lasting business” with the arrival of the two new types of subscriptions: Super Follows and ‘premium’ subscriptions, both paid.
“You will hear more of this in the coming months as we test and learn more and ultimately implement it for people around the world,” Segal said.
Previously, developer and reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong had discovered Twitter Blue’s internal testing, a feature priced at $ 2.99 per month that will make it possible to access various exclusive features such as collections and undo tweets.
Subscriptions ‘premium’ will work in parallel to the existing free mode of Twitter, as confirmed by the company, which plans to continue working to achieve “continuous improvement around the free version of the service that everyone will continue to have access to,” according to Segal. .
For his part, the Twitter executive commented on the Super Follows, already confirmed but without a launch date, which seek “for the creator to obtain as much as possible” in the cases of accounts that already have a network of followers willing to pay. for exclusive content, and that the role of the platform is to “facilitate the transaction.”
Meanwhile, Twitter extended the scope of its Audio Spaces function, similar to the Clubhouse social network, which is now also available for the platform in its web version, both for mobile and desktop.
The social network unveiled its audio Spaces in November last year and, since then, has been incorporating new functions such as configuration options that allow establishing who can participate and the possibility of creating new conversations for users with more than 600 followers.