The Daily Observer London Desk: Reporter- John Furner
TweetDeck users will need to be verified starting in August.
Twitter announced the change Monday, saying that after 30 days, users must be verified to access TweetDeck. That means that unless users have been given free verification, they’ll have to pay an $8-a-month subscription fee for Twitter Blue to be verified and use TweetDeck.
TweetDeck is a social media management tool used to view multiple timelines at once. The application is used by social millions of professional and casual Twitter users around the world.
However, that number likely will diminish significantly in a month once users have to pay for it.
The change is likely an effort to get more users to sign up for Twitter Blue, which hasn’t brought in the amount of money necessary to make up for losses in advertising revenue.
The announcement comes after a turbulent weekend for Twitter. After owner Elon Musk announced users would be temporarily limited in the number of posts they could see per day, TweetDeck effectively stopped working. Since users view hundreds of tweets a minute on TweetDeck, users hit their daily limit very early.
After the temporary limits were lifted on Monday, Twitter rolled out a new version of TweetDeck that the company has apparently been working on for years.
All of the user’s previous data will be imported over to the new version of the app and but team functionality will be delayed, according to the announcement.
User response was mixed, with some Musk fans irritated by what they see as a pointless change.
“This is hilarious. Instead of getting as many eyeballs on tweets as possible, which brings in ad revenue that actually makes you money, you’re still on this $8 thing. Meanwhile the value of posting here has completely cratered. Great work,” one user replied to the announcement.
