Over the past few months, this newsletter has been tracking the big social platforms developing features to support NFTs - those little blockchain entries that tell the world you ‘own’ a particular piece of media.
Yesterday, Twitter became the first platform to pull the trigger and officially launch an NFT feature. You’ll have to be a Twitter Blue subscriber to give it a go in the ‘Labs’ section of experimental features.
Once you’ve connected up a supported crypto wallet, you can display an NFT image as your profile picture, which will appear in a rounded hexagon shape, to make it stand out from the crowd.
Given the rush of NFT fans keen to show off their pastime (NFT Twitter was on fire about the news), it will be interesting to see how this affects Twitter Blue’s subscriber numbers.
But beyond this being a fun feature for those who get excited about the latest drop of cartoon apes, there are questions over how wise it is for a company like Twitter to make a feature out of NFTs at the moment.
The NFT world is rife with scams, a reality made worse by the fact that crypto wallets and trading is more complicated than many internet users are used to. And as many critics point out, blockchain tech can be bad for the environment, expensive for users (Etherium gas fees can exceed the price of a cheap NFT, which will make little sense to casual newcomers), and give people a false sense of ownership over something they might not really own in any meaningful sense at all.
By giving more visibility to NFTs (and perhaps making them more desirable thanks to the funky shape of the profile image), is Twitter helping draw more people into a technology that isn’t ready for the mainstream? Perhaps, but maybe not as much as Meta. It was
reported yesterday that the company is not only working on letting users display their NFTs on Facebook and Instagram, but also mint new ones themselves, and buy and sell them on a Meta-owned marketplace.
Many NFT fans will love the idea of their interest becoming more mainstream, but if the underlying technology isn’t super-safe or user-friendly, and has very limited real-world use at present, the question is - is this all too soon?
