Part of the media policy construct stems from the ongoing acquisition of Elon Musk, though some of it has obviously been in the works for some time.
Twitter has announced that it is testing a feature called Twitter Circle that allows you to share tweets with a chosen organization of people. It’s similar to Instagram’s Close Friends feature or, you know, what Google Plus is looking to do in 2011.
Lately, the feature is available to “a limited number of other people in the world. “If you have it, you can carry up to 150 other people in your circle (you can only have one right now). Interestingly, you can climb anyone into a circle, even if they don’t stick to you. When you create a new Tweet, you have the option to share it with everyone or just your circle.
Users in your circle will see all the tweets you share with them. They will respond normally, but they won’t be able to retweet it, at least not without taking a screenshot.
Only you can see a list of who is in your Circle. And, in another weird quirk, people can’t remove themselves from your Circle—just mute conversations. We’ll see whether or not this particular aspect stays if it rolls out more broadly.
Right now, if you’ve got access to Twitter Circles, you’ll be prompted to set one up the next time you Tweet using the iOS, Android, or web apps.
Twitter’s financial performance has long been at odds with its relevance to popular culture. In 2021, it had revenues of just over $5 billion, compared to Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) which had nearly $118 billion in revenue, and even Snap, which had $4.1 billion in revenue.
[Related: The pros and cons of finally getting an edit button on Twitter]
Although Musk recently said he doesn’t care about Twitter’s economics, the way his purchase proposal is structured includes him and the company taking on pretty gigantic debts that would require continued money for the service. This, along with the tension in his Tesla stock. , has supposedly made him a little more interested in finance.
This week, Musk tweeted a bad pun from Freemason followed by that “Twitter will still be loose for casual users, but maybe a small charge for business/government users. “In itself, this doesn’t seem like a horrible idea, although, as The Verge and Techdirt explain that the realities of implementing some sort of paid business option without (ironically) breaking speech legislation or upsetting everyone are less certain.
For what it’s worth, Twitter lately offers a paid subscription service called Twitter Blue. It costs $3 per month and offers users features like the Cancel Tweet option and bookmark folders.
In a now-deleted tweet in April, Musk also checked Twitter Blue users and allowed them to have an ad-free experience.
So regardless of what Musk says about not worrying about Twitter’s financial statements, it’s pretty clear that he’ll pressure the company to look for other tactics to generate profits in the near future.
Finally, as we took a deep look earlier this week, Twitter may only get an edit button. Apparently, this was already in process and surely has nothing to do with Musk’s purchase deal, we suspect that, given his statements further, if his purchase were to materialize, the feature would most likely be widely implemented.
We were also given an idea of how this might work, at least in the testing phase. Technically edited tweets will be new tweets that link to the original, and the edited tweet will be marked as such. This means that if someone edits a tweet that has already been retweeted, things (hopefully) won’t get too confusing.
And those are just the most important Twitter stories of the week. Among other news that emerged, Musk is expected to take over as chief transitory executive if the deal is concluded, has secured an additional $7. 1 billion investment for his deal, adding $1 billion from Larry Ellison and Irish President Michael D. Higgins called Musk’s acquisition “the manifestation of harmful narcissism. “Ouch.
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