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Bulletins

Twitter's paid subscription will let you undo all your bad takes

Twitter Blue launches Tuesday in the U.S. for $2.99 per month.

An image of Twitter Blue.

Twitter Blue costs $2.99 a month and launched in the U.S. on Tuesday for Android and iOS.

Image: Twitter

Twitter has officially started charging for all your bad jokes and questionable takes. The silver lining: It's only if you want that coveted undo tweet option.

The Twitter Blue subscription service, which costs $2.99, is finally available to users in the U.S. and New Zealand, with support for Android, iOS and the web. (Twitter Blue officially launched only for iOS in Australia and Canada back in June).

The service has been many years in the making as Twitter has trialed and tested various features to create a more premium experience power users might be interested in paying for. It's also a fascinating experiment in paid social networks, which have never quite taken enough at anywhere remotely near the scale of services from Meta, Snap and other Twitter competitors.

The most obvious and sought-after feature, of course, is the undo tweet option. It sets a time limit up to one minute under which your tweet can be revoked before anyone sees it if the tweet has a spelling error or you undergo a miraculous and instantaneous moment of clarity and realize you tweeted something inane or stupid.

Many other features have been borrowed from services Twitter acquired, most prominently Scroll and its link aggregator Nuzzel. From the former Twitter is introducing ad-free article links from partnered media companies (though not those bypassing a news organization's paywall), and from the latter Twitter Blue subscribers get a kind of all-in-one aggregation section called Top Articles that helps you keep track of the most-talked-about stories on the platform from within your network.

Some of these features right now are only available for certain platforms. For instance, Top Articles is only on Android and the web, while ad-free articles are only on iOS. You also still have to view Twitter's in-house ads as they appear in the timeline. "We are not currently considering a Twitter ads-free product," Sara Beykpour, a senior product manager, told The Verge.

Still, for those who'd like Nuzzel functionality back and the option to nuke your occasional terrible tweet before it gets you in any trouble, Twitter Blue might be worth the $2.99.

Nick Statt

Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.

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