Twitter is perhaps one of the few big companies that doesn"t beat around the bush when it comes to extending features and pushing out updates, sometimes at the behest of the community that uses the service as well.
One such incoming feature will be the ability to edit tweets after they have been published, and although this is claimed to be landing in the very near future, it has not been decided what sort of default restrictions will be put in place for editing to avoid abuse of the feature.
Speaking to independent journalist Matthew Keys, a couple of Twitter employees, who did not wish to be named, outlined their plans for the feature; once a user publishes a tweet, an “edit” feature will be present for a limited amount of time (Twitter is still currently working out the length of time the feature would be available).
The option would allow a user to make “slight changes” to the contents of a tweet, such as removing a word, correcting a typo or adding one or two additional words.
Edittng Facebook posts has been a feature for a while, as well as the option to view the Edit history.
An edit will only be possible once per tweet, and once the edit is made it will also be immediately visible on that user’s Twitter feed, much like how it is visible on Facebook too in the above example. The edit would also show up on the feed of anyone who retweets the edited tweet as well.
The magic does not stop there however, Twitter is also working on a way to tell if the tweet is edited to change the whole purpose of the original tweet as well, in such cases an edit would be denied. For example, if a user tweeted about a news article that links to the post, ranks up a lot of retweets and it goes viral only then for it to be changed into an advertisement or promo, this is something Twitter will be looking to avoid when the feature becomes available.
Twitter’s editorial algorithm, still being developed, is expected to be finished in a matter of “weeks, or months at the most” and would be rolled out to a select few at first, such as verified accounts, famous and high-profile users and various companies.
In any case, this would solve those facepalm moments for celebs and brands; for the rest of us, I guess we"ll have to stick with the "delete tweet" option for a while longer.
Source: The Desk