Elon Musk’s 𝕏 Has Seen 20 Noteable Updates in 4 Days

Elon Musk’s influence has brought a wave of enhancements to 𝕏, the app experiencing a surge of improvements since his acquisition in November. Remarkably, nearly all of these enhancements are reserved exclusively for blue subscribers. X has been consistently rolling out a plethora of new features recently, with August ushering in a fresh wave of updates. Here are some significant changes observed from August 1st onwards:

1. Soon, 𝕏 will allow users to sort posts by most liked and engaged, while also making it simpler to locate a user’s top posts on their profile page. This update follows a recent change to the logged-out profile view that highlights accounts’ highest-engagement tweets.
2. 𝕏 Blue is now known as 𝕏 Premium, with the new handle @premium. This change aligns with the speculation that the subscription service could be renamed to ” 𝕏 Premium”. This naming convention aligns with other social media and streaming subscriptions like YouTube Premium, LinkedIn Premium, and Snapchat Premium.
3. The 𝕏 team has expanded creator monetisation to more countries, addressing a limitation caused by Stripe’s availability as X’s payment processor.
4. Elon tested 𝕏’s Livestreaming functionality from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, demonstrating a commitment to improving the platform. To “Go Live” on the app, you simply need to Open 𝕏 and tap the “+” icon. Select “Go Live” after tapping the Camera. Notably, the Live Broadcast post appears on the feed immediately after it ends.
5. X now displays posts from Communities you belong to in the “For You” feed. The goal of the update is to boost Community posts and give them more visibility and engagement. “We hope to roll this out to more users soon and help with engagement and bring users back to Communities,” the company says in its post.
6. X introduced Desktop functionality for Spaces on August 4th, to improve sound quality and production. Desktop Spaces has been in progress on/off since the feature launched in 2021. The team started working on it again around May.
7. The @XHiring team started working on mobile functionality and additional features to match jobs with applicants, extending the platform’s utility beyond social interactions.
8. On August 3rd, 𝕏 began displaying a follow button for users you don’t follow in Tweet Details, aiming to encourage more user connections. This launched for Android users and will encourage users to follow more people on 𝕏! This new update will also let you know if someone follows you by turning the follow button into “Follow back” button!
9. The New Verified Organization page has gone live on 𝕏, expanding the reach of organic posts by organisations and affiliates.
10. Twitter’s introduction of “cashtags,” which link to stock charts, has seen a surge in clicks over the past months, indicating user engagement with this feature. A cashtag is a company ticker symbol preceded by the U.S. dollar sign, e.g. $TWTR. When you click on a cashtag, you’ll see other Tweets mentioning that same ticker symbol.
11. The importance of replies has escalated, making being a “reply guy” more advantageous. Replies will get you noticed way more. This new component pushes your replies to the timeline more (even over retweets). Meaning if you RT and reply to a tweet, the reply will be more visible. Use this feature more often to grow your account.
12. Users on 𝕏/Twitter can now decide if others can download their videos. This feature is limited to videos uploaded after the download feature was introduced, and it’s accessible only to 𝕏 Blue users. Note that if you’re under 18, the download setting is automatically set to OFF. Similar to a feature on TikTok, the company is also working on adding watermarks to videos for clear attribution.
13. 𝕏 also gave Creators the autonomy to adjust subscription prices, a feature prompted by a user request.
14. Rewinding or fast-forwarding videos on X can now be done using desktop arrow keys, a feature that wasn’t available in the platform’s earlier years.
15. On August 2nd, 𝕏 began testing a new sidebar layout, making the Trending section smaller and giving more prominence to the Who to Follow section. This change aims to address concerns about the relevancy and content of the Trending section.
16. 𝕏 now allows users to hide their Blue checkmarks. Initially introduced for Android, this feature is now available on iOS and the web version. The company notes that certain Blue features might be disabled when the Blue checkmark is hidden, although access to features like editing, long posts, long videos, and monetisation seems to remain unaffected. Click here to learn how to hide the Blue checkmark on iOS and Android.
17. Another addition is the ability for users to view who a person is subscribed to on mobile. Privacy-conscious users can hide their subscriptions on the web version.
18. X rebranded TweetDeck to XPro, adopting the @Pro handle instead of @TweetDeck. While the rebranding has taken place, parts of the tool still retain mentions of “Twitter” and “TweetDeck.”
19. Another notable update is X’s search function, which is now powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). This upgrade goes beyond basic text-based matches. Elon Musk hinted at this development, indicating that X’s semantic (AI) search is designed to provide posts that truly capture the essence of your search, rather than just relying on textual content.
20. The latest update is that 𝕏 is considering the launch of its own stock trading platform. While this might appear speculative, @xDaily initially posted about it but later removed the post after our article was published. For more details about the story, please refer to the article.

Kudos to the 𝕏 team who have been working tirelessly on improving user experience and adding valuable features to match Elon Musk’s vision of “an everything app”. Elon tested 𝕏’s Livestreaming functionality from the company’s Head Quarters in San Francisco. The 𝕏 team was only able to confirm the livestream’s quality at 3 am which means they all stayed at work till that hour.

What’s next for X? Only time will tell, but it’s clear that Elon Musk won’t stop pushing the 𝕏 team to extreme limits to achieve his vision of making the platform the best it can be, even if it requires giving up sleep to do so.