This week, Twitter released TweetDeck 2.0 and announced that as of August it will be available only to those who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription. Since competing products like Hootsuite and Buffer also charge for use, TweetDeck may entice those customers who find it a valuable tool to Twitter’s premium tier. Twitter owner Elon Musk has been paywalling various functions as he seeks to generate revenue to help meet hefty interest payments, estimated at $300 million every three months, from his highly publicized October 2022 acquisition. The third payment is due late this month.

The new TweetDeck supports full composer functionality, with Spaces, GIFs and polls. Better filters for advanced searches and the option to display TweetDeck columns sorted by Top Tweets or Latest Tweets are other improvements. The update also includes easier scheduling and video docking so users can watch a video while tending their tweets.

“Teams functionality in TweetDeck is temporarily unavailable and will be restored in the coming weeks,” Twitter announced, explaining the upgrades in a FAQ.

If TweetDeck wants to be competitive with third party social management tools it will have to add things like “profile comparisons, sentiment analysis, profile bio analysis [and] active times insight,” opines Social Media Today, which says “adding these into TweetDeck should be a no-brainer for Twitter’s subscription development team.”

Considering “Hootsuite brings in $150 million per year, with Twitter management playing a key part in its offering, while Buffer brings in $20 million, the opportunity is clear,” Social Media Today writes, adding that charging for TweetDeck “actually does make a lot of sense, especially if Twitter can increase its value and market differentiation.”

Forbes calls TweetDeck “a much loved feature,” explaining it allows “users to customize the experience of reading the social media site with multiple columns.”

Timing of the update and designation as a premium feature comes on the heels of Twitter setting “temporary” use caps. On July 1, Musk tweeted that verified users will be limited to reading 10,000 posts a day, unverified users 1,000 a day new unverified users to 500, according to Mint.

Forbes points out that “TweetDeck briefly worked as a way to circumvent Twitter’s new limits over the weekend, but that loophole was closed relatively quickly.”

The changes come at a time when Twitter’s competition is heating up, with new offerings like Bluesky, which Forbes reports “had to temporarily pause sign-ups over the weekend because it had too much interest.”

Meta Platforms yesterday debuted Threads, its bid for real-time digital conversations, and a challenger called Spill has has also emerged.

Forbes suggests the timing may be ideal for Threads and other competitors “as Twitter seems to be suffering from countless unforced errors,” musing “it’s hard to imagine something worse for a social media platform than restricting the ability of users to actually use the site.”