Twitter Becomes Premium Service, Priced at $5 per Month

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 01 Apr 2013

Twitter today announced that it is changing to a two-tiered service: the free, basic Twttr service and the premium Twitter service that will cost you $5 per month.

The team behind Twitter found a way to monetize the social networking and micro-blogging service: by turning Twitter into a premium, paid service ($5 per month). For the millions of users who do not want to pay for Twitter, the company is offering a basic, free service called Twttr.

Twttr – Free, But No Consonants
The basic, free version of Twitter will be called Twttr. The company can offer this service for free by dropping support for vowels. So by going with the free Twttr service, you only have access to consonants – no vowels. Consequently, a tweet will look like this.



We’re doing this because we believe that by eliminating vowels, we’ll encourage a more efficient and “dense” form of communication. We also see an opportunity to diversify our revenue stream,” explained Director of Product for Revenue at Twitter, Kevin Weil.

The one vowel that will continue to be supported will be Y. As you can see in the example above, Twttr users don’t have access to A, E, I, O, or U, but they still have access to Y. Since we’re talking about vowels, it must be added that the vowels in URLs will be maintained as well.

Moving on from Twitter to Twttr can be a big of a hassle. It’s not that easy to start tweeting without using any vowels – except for Y, which will always remain free. To help with the transition, Twitter set up a special webpage that automatically transforms tweets to a Twttr friendly format. You can try this webpage out by following this link.

Twitter – All Vowels for $5 per Month
Twitter will remain unchanged, you will have access to all vowels, but only if you decide to pay the $5 a month subscription. And since we’re talking about money, it must be said that Twitter introduced a paid single character extension that will expand the length of a tweet to 141 characters. This should come in handy when you have something important to say and you need one more extra character. How much will the extension cost? As Kevin Weil explained, “the price of the extra character is based on a bidding system reflecting the popularity of the character you would like to add.



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