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TWITTER BLUE IS EXPANDING

Twitter’s paid subscription service Blue has gained new features and expanded to new territories… but not yet the UK.

Twitter users in the US and New Zealand can now pay $2.99 or NZ$4.49 for an enhanced Twitter experience, joining those in Canada and Australia who have been able to sign up since earlier this year.

One of the new features is getting to read linked news stories from certain outlets ad-free, with a portion of your subs fee going to the news organisation providing the story. This joins bookmark folders, app customisation, an undo Tweet feature, and a list of ‘top’ news items from your Twitter network as premium features.

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU.COM

If you’re concerned about your privacy online, and why wouldn’t you be, there’s a new option for web search that doesn’t do Google-style tracking.

You.com is a service in beta, which also presents search results in a different way, categorising them into different areas to help you find what you’re looking for in a very clean and readable way.

You can opt to give up some privacy for the sake of personalisation, but there’s no requirement to do that, and You.com promises not to sell your data to advertisers. Free at the moment, without ads, the service will eventually make money in ways as yet undecided – but data-driven targeted ads will not be one of them.

INSTA’S TEXT TO SPEECH

Instagram has added the ability to translate text to speech on its shortform film platform Reels.

To allow those who have visual impairments to get your message, the app will speak any text on you’re Reels out loud – allowing you, also, to add narration to tell your story without using your own voice.

If you do use your own voice, there’s now an option to add some faintly amusing voice filters – perfect if you want to sound as if you’ve recently inhaled some helium from a balloon.