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Elon Musk announced Early version of Wednesday Video and voice calls is now available on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The move is another step toward Musk’s goal of turning X into a “everything app” that can handle everything from online payments to news to food delivery.
It’s not yet accessible to all users, and X hasn’t revealed a timeline for widespread rollout of the feature. The company also hasn’t confirmed what tech veteran Chris Messina discovered in the X code: that voice and video calls are only available to subscribers.
According to TechCrunch Previous article:
Other lines of code refer to the warning that appears when someone attempts to DM another user on the app, explaining that “voice and video calling are premium features” and stating that “Access “Subscribe to get the rights.” This means that the user must: Pay for X Premium…
It’s also unclear how users can actually screen calls. For users with early access to this feature, options to allow calls include authenticated users, users you follow, and users in your address book.
After Musk took office, X stopped responding to requests for comment and only responded to media inquiries with automated messages. So I couldn’t ask for details about why X introduced this feature, and why now.
Indeed, Musk has not been shy about wanting to turn X into a platform like China’s WeChat, the messaging app that has become the central location for all digital transactions, including shopping, news, and communication. . But Musk’s overarching vision for X was always as a financial services app.
Around the time Musk bought Twitter, the billionaire told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson what he thought the platform would become. “By combining a social network and a payment platform, he could make X.com what I wanted it to be.”
Mask has been rebranded From Twitter to X But X.com has been around since 1999, when it was the predecessor to PayPal. At the time, Musk believed that X.com could become a one-stop, everything-store for all your financial needs, including banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans.
It seems like video calls and voice calls don’t necessarily align with that goal. In fact, the idea of ​​having a phone there to quickly consume information on a social media platform is a bit jarring to the senses. It gets even more annoying when the call comes from a random authenticated X user.
But on a different note, Musk may be trying to take a page out of Uber’s non-stop product rollout book and do something like this: create stickiness Uber started as a ride-hailing service and then moved into food delivery. Now, the company has expanded on these pillars to provide users with the following features: charter a boatreturn the package to the post office, and make dinner reservations.
That’s similar to how Amazon played the gamecan use other products, such as Alexa, to bring ancillary revenue to its core business when a customer says, “Alexa, order another peanut butter.”
How that plays out in X is that users may come looking for shitposts and live spaces, but they also have Internet-enabled phones, long-form posts and videos, and A high-yield savings account. And since these features are likely only available to subscribers, the traditional tactic of throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks could become a revenue driver for X.
Or maybe not.
It all depends on whether Musk can implement his broader plans in the long term. Not only is it a technical problem to solve, but the US is not China. Regulators keep a close eye on tech companies to ensure that no one company owns too much of the Internet.