Twitter announced a paid blue check plan at a price of $8/month soon after Elon Musk acquired the company last year. The company advertised the following features for this premium plan.
I recently did a test drive of X Blue. Here are its pros and cons based on my personal experience.
What’s Hot
Longer posts: Create posts (fka tweets) of 25,000 characters. This works as advertised in some situations but not in others. More on this in a bit.
Edit posts up to five times within one hour: This is true for one’s own posts. But, when I reply to somebody else’s posts, I get only one chance at editing by clicking the UNDO button.
Format: Post editor supports boldface, italics, bullets and other formatting features. This is quite useful.
Inline image: I’ve seen some posts with inline images although I didn’t get a chance to try out this feature.
X Pro: X Pro is the new name for Tweetdeck, which was available for free in the past. Now a premium feature, X Pro is a decent substitute for Hootsuite and other Twitter dashboards that show different feeds like timeline, notifications, bookmarks, and scheduled posts as multiple panels on a single screen.
What’s Not
No visibility for longer posts: Only the first 260 characters are visible on longer posts on the timeline. To see them in their entirety, I need to click a button. What’s worse, when I hit reply to a longer post, I see only the first 260 characters. Thankfully, nobody expects thoroughness anymore, least of all on Twitter, otherwise I’d have to open another browser tab to see the full post before I compose my reply.
No search for longer posts: Twitter Advanced Search parses only the first 260 characters of a post. In other words, if you search by a keyword that’s present after the 260th character of your post, then the said post won’t show up in your search results.
Is it only me or does X / Twitter Search parse only the first 260 characters of posts longer than that?
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) September 22, 2023
This is a big killjoy since I use search quite extensively, and drastically reduces the utility of longer posts – and, by extension, Twitter Blue itself – in my usage context.
Missing Undo button: I suddenly noticed that all my replies were getting posted without displaying the Undo button. In other words, I lost the ability to edit my reply posts (although I could still edit my own posts.)
No scheduling for longer posts: I’m not sure if this feature is widely known but X supports scheduling of posts (à la Hootsuite). Just click the calender / clock icon on the post editor and you can select the data and time you want your tweet to be posted.
You can view your scheduled posts here. Although this screen is a bit clunky since it’s displayed as a lightbox, it gets the job done.
Unfortunately, this icon is dimmed if the post exceeds 260 characters. In other words, the scheduling feature is not supported for longer posts. This is also a bit of a killjoy in my usage context.
Not PPP
When Twitter Blue was announced, its subscription cost $8/month for USA. Elon Musk tweeted that the price for different nations would be adjusted by their PPP. This was in line with the practice followed by streaming video, SAAS and other global products of calibrating their prices by Purchasing Power Parity in different countries.
As stated in my blog post entitled Global Pricing Tracks PPP Not PCI, the PPP for INR against USD is 22.458. Going by this, the price of Twitter Blue for India should have been 8*22.458 = INR 180/month ~ INR 2156/year.
However, by the time the subscription was rolled out, the monthly fees for India was INR 650, which was the same as the $8 in USA. In other words, Twitter Blue’s price was not adjusted by PPP.
This is Exhibit A that the “overcommit and underdeliver” ethos of Elon Musk from Tesla has entered X.
Last week, @elonmusk Xeeted that X will introduce two new premium plans, one with ads and the other without. I asked him if the price will be adjusted by PPP.
Will the prices be adjusted by PPP of country? https://t.co/waMi0dQOT8
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) October 20, 2023
I haven’t heard back.
For the moment, I haven’t renewed by subscription. I’ll await details of the new plan before I decide next steps.
On a side note, I’m in two minds about ad versus ad-free plans.
Much of the Internet has been – and still is – supported by ads. In this model, the content is made available for free and the publisher makes money by selling ads targeting the eyeballs of readers. We then saw the emergence of ad-free models where people paid a subscription fee and avoided seeing ads. This suggested that people perceive ads negatively and are willing to pay a price to avoid them.
But I’m in marketing and love ads, at least the good ones!
Accordingly, I can’t make up my mind if the ad-free feature of X Blue belongs in What’s Hot or What’s Not category.