It’s part of the paid subscription service, but wasn’t available on all platforms when it first launched
Twitter’s Top Articles feature, which creates a report of articles popular in Blue subscribers’ networks, is now available on iOS after the company promised last week that it’d be coming “very soon.” It’s been available on Android and the web, but now everyone who subscribes to Twitter’s paid service should be able to see a roundup of what people were reading and tweeting about over the past day.
Top Articles is a sort of spiritual successor to a service called Nuzzel, which provided a similar roundup through email. Nuzzel was run by a company called Scroll, and was shut down when Twitter acquired the company earlier this year. Twitter said at the time it planned to bring Nuzzel back, and now its most popular feature is available to anyone who is willing to pay the price for Twitter Blue. The premium service also gives users extra features like the ability to “undo” tweets or read ad-free articles.
While Twitter Blue subscribers who miss Nuzzel will likely be excited that Top Articles is now available on all the major platforms, it does feel like there should be a lite-version for those who don’t want to directly pay for Twitter.
While it makes sense that ad-free articles will incur a subscription cost, Twitter Blue as a whole creates the impression that Twitter is paywalling basic features that should be available to everyone, regardless of which tier of Twitter they’re using. In that vein, Threader (an app that makes Twitter threads more readable by formatting them as articles) announced on Monday that it had been acquired by Twitter, and that it would be included in Twitter Blue. While this is likely good news for those with Blue, it being paywalled won’t help general Twitter users navigate threads any easier.
