Twitter Launches Paid Subscription First in Canada and Australia ⇥ blog.twitter.com

Sara Beykpour and Smita Mittal Gupta of Twitter:

We’ve heard from the people that use Twitter a lot, and we mean a lot, that we don’t always build power features that meet their needs. Well, that’s about to change. We took this feedback to heart, and are developing and iterating upon a solution that will give the people who use Twitter the most what they are looking for: access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience on Twitter to the next level.

Twitter calls this tier Twitter Blue, which is a great name but with a feature set that I do not find compelling. I imagine many heavy users would pay ten bucks a month for no ads and a chronological timeline. Heck, I know many people would pay for editable tweets. Gareth suggested that it could be an identity verification mechanism, too, and better search functionality would help journalists immensely.

Alas, the initial feature set is a bit underwhelming. There are folders for bookmarks, a better thread reader, some different icons and themes — odd for a product named after a specific colour — and the closest thing to editable tweets is an undo button that disappears after a few seconds. Twitter says that it will add more features over time. I certainly hope so. I would love to pay for Twitter, but this is a surprisingly weak offering.