A subscription add-on to the Twitter service started here in Canada recently so I thought I would check it out for a while.
What Twitter Blue Includes
- Bookmark Folders – users already have access to store their bookmarks but upon subscription, they are able to file them in folders.
- Undo Tweet – a tweet is sent on a delay giving the user time to review before it is sent, like the delay you can set on emails going out. A user can stop it being sent and change any of the text. Once the tweet has been sent you cannot undo it.
- Reader Mode – able to read long threads in a newspaper-style format
- Icons – some more icons available for the user to choose from
- Support – Twitter promised a faster route to obtain support
Cost
For Canadian users, the service is CAD$3.49 per month which, after-tax in British Columbia, works out to be about CAD$3.91. So really, that is $4.00 a month just about.
Review
The only benefit that was moderately useful to me was the Undo Tweet feature, but that turned out to be a bit of a nuisance waiting for something I had already reviewed to be sent. You can’t set up a delay on each tweet just on all tweets going out. Twitter has pitched this as an Edit feature but falls short of actually editing an entry once it’s been posted, in which case you have to delete it and post it again.
The bookmark feature is moderately useful but I tended to actually place them somewhere else outside of Twitter.
Icon. Well, that’s just silly really, I don’t really care about what icon is there on my iOS screen.
Support. I never noticed any route to gain faster support, felt I was the same as anyone else.
The Twitter blue service isn’t even available on Desktop, even though I had access to it via my iPad and iPhone. Since I use my Desktop the most I wasn’t even benefiting from it for most of the time I was on the service.
What Made Me Cancel
I wasn’t impressed with the service at all. If they are going to charge they really should have been more imaginative. All users should have access to the Undo Tweet feature anyway, it may make people think before they tweet anything offensive.
If I had many thousands of followers and a business I would find Twitter Blue useful, but I am just an average user with not a large impact on there.
Also, today, Sunday 1st August, Twitter has been down all day and felt I wasn’t going to pay a special price for something I can’t even access from hours upon end.