Twitter Blue subscriptions roll out globally, despite missing many promised features

People all over the world can now pay for Twitter, as the company has announced that its Twitter Blue subscription service is now available globally. While the subscription has been pretty widely available before (you could sign up for it in almost 50 countries), the expanded availability reflects the company’s drive to make Twitter Blue an increasingly important part of the service.

Part of those efforts, however, includes making promises that it hasn’t kept yet. The company’s announcement tweets list some of the benefits of Twitter Blue, such as getting a checkmark, the ability to write longer tweets, getting prioritized ranking in conversations, and seeing half as many ads. Those last two, however, haven’t actually rolled out yet. When you click on the link to sign up for the service, they’re still listed as “Coming Soon.”

CEO and owner Elon Musk has been promising prioritized ranking since November, calling the feature “essential to defeat spam/scam.” However, despite (or maybe because of) Musk’s push to make employees work in “hardcore” conditions, it hasn’t materialized. The same is true for several of his other promises — in February, he announced that Twitter was starting to share ad revenue with Blue subscribers, something that hasn’t started happening over a month later, and he promised to open source the company’s algorithm on the week of February 27th. That didn’t happen, but he’s now promising that it will occur on March 31st.

Twitter Blue’s original relaunch under Musk was pretty rocky. Nearly immediately after the subscription went live in early November, a whole bunch of people bought verified checkmarks to impersonate brands like Nintendo and celebrities like LeBron James, and signups disappeared shortly after. The subscription was re-relaunched in December and has been expanding since then.