Given that Twitter already offered premium API access, they've got billing in place, so now they add a new form that, once your credit card is verified, flicks a boolean on an account that was previously flicked by another process.
It’s more than that. For one it’s not an existing boolean, there are now two different kinds of blue tick that are presumably stored separately. Blue is also supposed to give the user fewer ads (while making them more relevant) as well as additional weight in feed ranking algorithms. It’s also intended to be offered worldwide which adds a lot of complication to things like payment flows.
I’m not saying it’s going to bring the site down tomorrow but that one feature touches on a lot of services.
Clearly worldwide payments is an issue otherwise they’d have rolled it out worldwide day one, and they didn’t. There must be something holding that back.
Plus I really don’t think you can compare B2B payments for premium API access to end user payments. Not least because they aren’t going to be going the same route: a huge number of them will be via Apple or Google in-app purchasing. Ask anyone who works with those systems, it isn’t a quick plug and play job.
In general though, a new subscription tier, feed algorithm changes, UI changes… if these aren’t, what is a big change in your book?
Is that true? I thought one of Elon’s big pushes was launching the whole Blue Tick subscription thing. That doesn’t feel like a small feature.