To tweet or not to, an account on Twitter is something for the latter day social media technologists. It does not matter whether your name has a badge to it, or how much time it takes for you to use the platform.
If you are an avid tweep, you should have noticed the demand for an edit button, or have asked yourself for the ability to edit what you post, at least once after noting a mistake.
For most users, all they do is delete and republish tweets when they want to correct mistakes. Good news is, Twitter is working on something about that.
In a podcast interview with Joe Rogan, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked about his take on tweet editing to which Dorsey responded with both the reason it has been hard to introduce tweet editing, and a possible way the company can bring it on.
He explained that the reason Twitter doesn’t have an edit option is that the platform was “born on SMS”.
“We were born on text messaging – when you send a text you can’t take it back. So when you send a tweet it goes to the world instantaneously – you can’t take it back”.
So, just like you can’t take back or alter a text message you have sent to someone, you cant change a tweet, because that is how the site was built.
Dorsey added that they “could build it such that maybe we introduce a five send to 30 second delay in the sending, and within that window you can edit”. To this he explained that going longer than 30 seconds implies that the real-time nature and the conversational flow is killed.
He also says that the edit option would easily allow harassers to post anything that could then be edited or retracted after the damage is done.
And for purposes of transparency, Dorsey says the system could as well incorporate the original tweet when an edit has been made.
