You whimpered and you moaned and you moaned. And no, you don’t get the “Edit Tweet” button, but Twitter is testing something almost as good. Will make it you happy?
Users have long been demanding, and Twitter has repeatedly refused to implement a tool that allows them to modify the content of tweets already sent. Still, soon, users can stop embarrassing themselves in the next best (or maybe outright better) way: their tweets before they actually go live.
Per 9to5Mac, reverse engineering expert and prolific data miner Jane Manchun Wong has discovered Twitter is working on an unsent tweets timer that will give users about five seconds after tweeting to reconsider whether or not it was a good idea. This is not the same as an edit button, but it does help solve the problem of hitting send and immediately realizing a message with a grammatical error, a reply to the wrong user, was just unwise, or was downright ignorant.
It’s not clear when the undo tweet feature might be rolled out or if it’s just a test that users may never get to, but Twitter has been in a technical tour de force lately. Many of the features it has announced or rolled out in recent months are clones of other popular sites and apps, including its own clones. audio chat meeting point Clubhouse disappearing Instagram Stories make money Substack newsletters, and Patreon subscriptions
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The edit button was one of Twitter’s most requested features, but CEO Jack Dorsey said last year it almost certainly will never be implemented because it is also not the case that you can take back a text message. (The difference here is that the stake for tweeting can be a little higher than for texting, depending on how many people read it. And the Wayback Machine is relentless.) There are other obvious drawbacks of an editing feature, such as the certainty that one of its biggest uses would be to troll other Twitter users by enticing them to reply to posts or quote posts that suddenly say something completely different.
“We started as an SMS, SMS service. And as you all know, you can’t really take back a text message, ‘Dorsey said in a YouTube video when discussing the prospects of an edit button“We wanted to keep that atmosphere, that feeling, in the beginning … we probably never will.”
For now, just pretend you never hit send at all, which is probably for the best.