People around the world can now pay for Twitter, as the company has announced that its Twitter Blue subscription service is now available worldwide. Although the subscription has been fairly widely available before (you can sign up for it in nearly 50 countries), the expanded availability reflects the company’s desire to make Twitter Blue an increasingly important part of the service.
Part of that effort, however, is making promises he has yet to deliver. The company’s announcement tweets list some of the benefits of Twitter Blue, such as getting a tick, being able to write longer tweets, getting priority ranking in conversations, and seeing twice less advertisements. The latter two, however, have yet to be rolled out. When you click on the link to sign up for the service, they are still listed as “Coming Soon”.
CEO and owner Elon Musk promised priority ranking since november, calling the feature “essential to beating spam/scams”. However, despite (or perhaps because of) Musk’s desire to have employees work under “hardcore” conditions, this did not materialize. The same goes for several of his other promises – in February he announced that Twitter was starting to share ad revenue with Blue subscribers, which didn’t start happening more than a month later, and he promised to open the company’s algorithm on the week of February 27. It didn’t happen, but he now promises that it will take place on March 31.
The company also announced Thursday that it has started accepting applications from government and organizational accounts that want a gray tick. Its documentation says eligible accounts include heads of state, members of congress or parliament, institutional accounts at headquarters level, regional level and national level. (For example, the National Park Service has a gray check mark, just like the american president.)
The gray checks – as well as the gold checks for businesses – are intended to help clear up the confusion caused by the meaning of the blue check ranging from “a person or organization that Twitter has verified” to “a person or organization that Twitter has verified or someone who pays for Blue Musk promised to get rid of the “legacy blue checks” that showed verification, saying they “are really corrupt”, but so far that hasn’t happened either. Now clicking on someone with a blue check that doesn’t pay for Blue shows you the message “This is an old verified account. This may or may not be noticeable.
Update from March 23 at 4:58 p.m.: Updated with information about gray tick apps.
