Twitter has been slowly evolving into a richer social media service. What started as a basic tool to express ideas using no more than 140 characters has now gained some advanced features. These include Spaces for audio rooms, voice note support in DMs, text formatting, and more. Eventually, the company launched what plenty of users didn't see coming — a paid subscription.
Twitter Blue brings additional features and perks for a monthly fee — $11 through the mobile app or $8 through the website. While the service was first exclusive to a handful of countries, it has now become available worldwide. Here's what paying for Twitter Blue actually gets you.
Verified checkmark
Following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and overhaul of Blue, the Verified blue checkmark is no longer exclusive to celebrities, businesses, and public figures. Instead, anyone with a verified phone number who pays for Twitter Blue will get this checkmark — after Twitter's staff verify that they're not impersonating another person. Meanwhile, eligible businesses get a golden checkmark, and government accounts get gray ones. If you're associated with a company with a checkmark, you can also get a blue checkmark.
For the time being, certain Legacy Verified accounts that have a significant following will get to keep their blue checkmarks for free. Otherwise, most Legacy Verified accounts have lost their badges and won't be able to restore them without paying for Blue.
To make impersonation attempts even harder, Twitter limits the Blue subscription to accounts that are older than 30 days. So if you have a fresh account, you will have to wait. Additionally, changing your profile picture, display name, or username will hide the Verified checkmark until the staff manually revalidates your account.
Bookmark folders
Twitter offers all users — free and paid — the option to bookmark tweets. The list of bookmarks is private and only accessible to you. It's meant to be a place where you can access all of your saved tweets inside the app — instead of pasting links in your notes app for future reference.
However, Blue takes this feature to the next level and introduces folders. This allows paid users to categorize their bookmarked tweets based on their preferences. As a result, it makes digging into them and finding the right one easier and quicker, thanks to their respective folders. The feature is available on iOS, Android, and the web, and your folders will sync across the platforms.
Custom app icons
Blue allows iOS and Android users to change the Twitter app icon on their devices. The company currently offers eight colorful icons to choose from. Additionally, Twitter sometimes introduces limited-time icons on certain occasions, such as Halloween. This feature is just for cosmetic purposes and doesn't actually add or improve any functionalities.
Themes
Twitter has supported themes on both mobile and desktop for years now. Blue reintroduces the very same feature as a paid one on the mobile app. It allows users to choose between Blue (default), Yellow, Red, Purple, Orange, and Green. However, all users — free and paid — can take advantage of it on mobile by adding the Progressive Web App (PWA) to their home screens or using the mobile website in their favorite browser. It's unclear why the company hadn't supported themes on the mobile app until now. And it's yet to be seen whether it'll be paywalled on the website down the road.
Custom navigation
Custom Navigation is yet another cosmetic feature that users have to pay for. Twitter has been rolling out Spaces and Communities tabs in the bottom navigation bar. However, plenty of users dislike having them there, considering not all of us are interested in these sections of the app. Blue allows you to reorder, add, or remove tabs from the bottom navigation bar.
Home is the only stable tab that users can't remove — for obvious reasons. Otherwise, users can choose up to five other tabs to add to the bottom bar. These include Explore, Spaces, Notifications, Messages, Bookmarks, Lists, Profile, Top Articles, Monetization, and Communities. There's also a Restore to default button in case you want to restore the navigation bar to its original state.
Top articles
This feature compiles the most shared articles by the people you follow (and the accounts they follow, too) in the past 24 hours. This allows you to easily take a glance at or read about the topics getting actively shared in your network. The Top Articles section can be accessed through the Profile menu with a right swipe from the left edge of the screen. Alternatively, you can add a shortcut to it in the navigation bar through Twitter Blue settings.
Reader
Twitter acquired Threader a while back and shut it down. This service allowed users to compile long Twitter threads into an easy-to-read view. Blue now offers a similar feature on iOS, Android, and the web. When you click on a thread, a new Reader button will appear, enabling you to convert it into an article-like page. This hides the tweet's metadata and focuses on its content instead.
Undo Tweet
This Blue feature allows users to view a tweet for a preset number of seconds before it's posted publicly. This way, they can proofread it to ensure they haven't made any typos before it goes live. The feature doesn't actually undo live tweets. It only adds a timer to the post button. Free users can just proofread their tweets before they hit the post button as an alternative to this paid feature. Blue users can utilize it on iOS, Android, and the web.
Longer, higher-quality video uploads
Twitter allows free users to post videos with a maximum length of 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Blue enables paid users to post videos that are up to 2 hours long (8GB). It also exclusively supports 1080p video uploads. This perk works on Twitter for iOS and the web.
NFT profile pictures
Additionally, Blue users get to link a crypto wallet of theirs and use one of the NFTs they own as a profile photo. To distinguish NFT profile photos, Twitter adds a hex-shaped frame — making them easier to spot.
