Twitter is still working on its upcoming Edit button. While several people saw the in-development “Edit Tweet” menu item last month, we didn’t know how altered tweets would appear to Twitter users or how the original text of the edited tweet might be read. We can now see what Twitter is doing to highlight the fact that tweets have been edited.
The Edit Tweet button, according to reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, will allow users to compose a new tweet with alternative content.
However, a label (together with an icon of a small pen or pencil) will show at the bottom of the tweet to alert Twitter users that the message has been modified from the original. “Edited” will be the only wording on the label. You may also get to the tweet’s edit history by clicking on the word “Edited.”
Users will have 30 minutes to make modifications to their tweets, according to Wong. That’s a little longer than what’s required to swiftly repair a typo, which Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service, already allows for. But it’s long enough to clarify or rephrase a tweet that’s about to go viral for all the wrong reasons.
How an edited Tweet looks like on Twitter Web App: pic.twitter.com/boouYlvhA3
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 2, 2022
Wong had previously identified code references to the work-in-progress Edit Tweet feature in a recent build of the Twitter web app, indicating that the Edit button wasn’t truly fixing or updating the text in the original tweet — it was instead creating a new tweet with the altered content. We didn’t know how Twitter would handle this essential context in its user interface until she mentioned the new, modified tweet will include a list of old tweets prior to the edit.
Her most recent discoveries, which Wong claims she discovered while working on Twitter’s web app, give us a better understanding.
Because the new, modified tweet and the old tweet are two separate entities, it’s possible that someone will still link to the previous version. In such situation, the user would see the old tweet with the label “There’s a new version of this Tweet,” which would direct them to the updated version with the new text.
Wong told TechCrunch that the “Edited” label is small and incongruous with the rest of Twitter’s user interface, indicating that the functionality is still under development. However, because the feature isn’t yet live, this will most likely be fixed before a more widespread introduction.
Although this is a modest change, it gives Twitter users an idea of how the company is thinking about the Edit Tweet functionality in terms of how it will affect the user experience on Twitter as well as the company’s own backend processes.
Allowing anyone to alter the text in the original tweet, as others have pointed out, would have meant that both the old and new versions would point to the same tweet ID, which could have complicated things from an engineering standpoint. According to them, based on the tweet ID, it might have been a nightmare for caching systems. Instead, Twitter assigns a new tweet ID to the changed message, while connecting to older versions from the most recent one.
Last month, Twitter made the shocking announcement that it would finally give users the ability to edit messages, a long-requested feature that incoming Twitter CEO Elon Musk has also pushed for. The firm hasn’t announced when the function would be available to the general public, but Twitter Blue subscribers may expect to try it out “in the coming months.”
