Twitter might build a paid subscription service for power users – The Verge (Mar 23, 2017)
I’m in two minds about this report. On the one hand, I’ve thought for a while that some kind of premium subscription service would be a great way to allow the heaviest users of Twitter to pay for the value they get out of it (while potentially avoiding ads), and serve as a useful additional revenue stream at a time when Twitter’s ad revenue has been stagnating. On the other hand, the news that this will effectively be an enhanced version of Tweetdeck is less appealing. Tweetdeck is for a particular type of Twitter user – one who wants lots of tabs open at once with various different feeds – but that’s not all power users by any stretch. And as an app Tweetdeck has a somewhat miserable reputation for reliability – the only times I ever see it mentioned on Twitter itself are when it’s crashing on people. I’ve used it occasionally in the past, but not for some time now, not least because it’s been neglected as a native app on macOS since 2015. If this new option really is limited to and centered on Tweetdeck, it’ll have appeal mostly limited to a certain kind of power user (mostly companies, brands, and professional social media managers), but if it’s instead aimed at power users broadly and supports other endpoints too, then it’s more interesting. We’ll probably have to wait until Twitter concludes its testing to know one way or the other, though.
via The Verge
The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.
Vote for or share this post
Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.