This week, X dominated the news circuit with roughly 10,000 new updates (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration). But amid the noise, Edits quietly rolled out some game-changers of its own.
Meanwhile, BookTok is in MELTDOWN, animal of the week goes to a cat called to jury service, Lily Allen is scaring men, and more. Read on for more social media news.
X launches live test of X Chat
For the past few months, we’ve been quietly building a standalone X Chat app for iOS.
Today we’re opening it to the first 1,000 users on TestFlight.
X has taken the leap and launched a live test of its separate DMing app – X Chat. Although a separate app, messaging will still be linked to your X account. The test was initially open to the first 1,000 X users who signed up, and later expanded to the first 5,000. As well as the usual text-based messaging, users will also soon be able to access features like voice messaging, message request filtering and verified badges.
X has upgraded its creator subscription options, giving creators more opportunities to make money on the platform. Creators can now hide content behind a paywall with a new Exclusive Threads feature. These posts are shown in-stream to all users, with gated content kept hidden for subscribers only. Creators can also now list subscription benefits in-stream, and a new subscribe now pop up had been added. Other updates include new shareable Subscriptions cards, revamped onboarding, and an updated subscription dashboard.
Today we're announcing Paid Partnership labels on posts. X's core value is providing on authentic pulse on humanity.
While we want to encourage people to build their businesses on X, undisclosed promotions hurt the integrity of the product and lead people to distrust the content… pic.twitter.com/CmrRDx5tU1
X is adding a new “Paid Partnership” label to the platform for creators to add to sponsored posts. There are pretty strict rules around disclosing ads on social, and until now, X users have had to rely on using hashtags like #paidpartnetship or #ad to label posts. Going forward, creators will be able to toggle on a new “content disclose” setting, which will apply the Paid Partnership label. It can also be applied retrospectively in case you forget when posting.
Meta adds new updates to Edits
Image credits: Meta/Edits
The ever-growing list of features on Edits is, well, growing. First up, there are multiple new video effects, including a new coloured outline for clip segments. Users will also be able to highlight words in their video captions to make them stand out during playback. Finally, an update to the Ideas tab gives users more options to make saved notes more visual and engaging.
