In April, Twitter announced that it’s working on an edit button, a feature that will allow its users to edit their tweets after they have posted it. On Thursday, the microblogging app announced that it is trialing the edit feature.
The social media company said the feature will allow users to change tweets up to 30 minutes after they are published, and that tweets can be edited a few times within the 30 minutes window.
The tweets will appear with an icon, timestamp and label to make it clear that the original post has been modified. Viewers can click on the label to view edit history, which will include past versions of the tweet.
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“It’s true: Edit Tweet is being tested by our team internally. The test will then be initially expanded to Twitter Blue subscribers in the coming weeks. Given that this is our most requested feature to date, we wanted to both update you on our progress and give you and a heads up that, even if you’re not in a test group, everyone will still be able to see if a Tweet has been edited.” – Twitter said.
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1565318587736285184?s=20&t=godXv6MT4-lJsluDNgfD7Q
The feature, which will be rolled out in the next few weeks, is now being tested among a small group of users to address any possible issues. Twitter said the feature will be limited to one country first. The company added that it will be expanded to subscribers of Twitter’s Blue Service, the $4.99 per month class, later this month.
The Twitter Blue, which is only available in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, has features such as an “undo” button, which gives users a 60-second window to amend a sent tweet before it goes public.
The half an hour window period edit button, which was created as a result of growing demand by Twitter users, though longer than the one minute function of Twitter Blue, is considered not enough.
As recent as two years ago, Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey had ruled out the possibility of an edit button. So the edit function was never in plan as it was a way to make everyone own up to their errors.
Twitter said the 30 minutes window is to keep conversations on the platform upright.
“The time limit and version history play an important role here. They help protect the integrity of the conversation and create a publicly accessible record of what was said,” the company said.
Twitter users overwhelmingly voted yes earlier this year after Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, who became the company’s highest shareholder at that time, conducted a poll asking his followers if they would want an edit button.
But Twitter said it has been silently working on the feature before Musk conducted his poll. In a blog post, the company described an edit button as the platform’s “most requested feature” from its nearly 238 million users. However, Twitter said users should view the trial feature as “a short period of time to do things like fix typos, add missed tags and more”.
“We’re hoping that, with the availability of edit tweets, tweeting will feel more approachable and less stressful. You should be able to participate in the conversation in a way that makes sense to you, and we’ll keep working on ways that make it feel effortless to do just that,” said the company.