News

Twitter Is Testing Two New Useful Features

Published

6 years ago

March 19, 2021

Associated Press

If you’re an observing Twitter user, there’s a chance that you’ve already noticed two new buttons. One of the two buttons is titled “Shop,” and it’s intended for tweets containing links to product pages on a shop’s website. The other button is titled “Undo,” and it lets you undo a recently sent tweet.

Shop Button

The Shop button was spotted by Qatar-based social media consultant Matt Navarra, who first noticed it on his Android device. Tweets with the Shop button can be seen as alternatives to ads because they both serve the same purpose. The biggest difference between them is that ads are not organic, and many Twitter users don’t see them at all because they use various ad-blockers.

The color of the Shop button matches Twitter’s established color scheme, but it’s likely that it will eventually be customizable. If the button takes off, then we could see other similar e-commerce buttons launch in the future, such as a subscription button.

Twitter has also recently announced that it’s aiming to become a creator platform, so that’s yet another use case for this new tweet format, with exclusive subscriber-only content being just one click away.

Undo Button

While arguably less exciting, the Undo button is something all Twitter users can appreciate. It appears for five to six seconds when a user hits send on a tweet, giving the user a chance to change their mind and make the tweet disappear before the whole world sees it.

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We expect the feature to result in fewer tweets with typos and embarrassing grammar errors, but we can also see it saving relationships and careers by making users rethink whether their tweet is really appropriate or not.

Unfortunately, there still hasn’t been any news about the prospect of an Edit button, which Twitter users have been requesting for years now. But because Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey previously said that Twitter would likely never implement it, it’s probably nowhere on the horizon.

News

Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict

Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.

Published

4 days ago

September 24, 2026

Nour Nasir

Microsoft

Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.

“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.

The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.

The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.

Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.

Also Read: Egypt’s Mobile Wallets Are Booming, But Cash Still Has Power

The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.

So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.