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| Photo Credit:AP. |
(AP) - Permanently misspelled tweets might soon be a thing of the past.
Twitter said
Thursday it will roll out an editing feature to subscribers of its premium
Twitter Blue service later this month.
In an update
on its plans to introduce an edit button, the social media company said it has
been testing the feature internally, which it said is one of the most requested
features to date.
The edit
function will give users 30 minutes to make changes to their 280-character
messages such as fixing typos or adding hashtags after first publishing a
tweet.
To make it
clear that a tweet has been modified, they’ll be labeled and appear with an
icon and timestamp. Users can look up past versions of the tweet by tapping the
label.
Twitter said
it’s testing the edit feature with a small group of users so it can identify
and resolve potential issues.
“This
includes how people might misuse the feature,” the company said in a blog post.
“You can never be too careful.”
The time
limit and version history play an important role, Twitter said. “They help
protect the integrity of the conversation and create a publicly accessible
record of what was said.”
Twitter
hinted that the edit feature would eventually be rolled out to all users.
Testing helps the company understand how it impacts the way people use Twitter
“as well as plan for and anticipate what might happen if we bring it to
everyone,” spokeswoman Stephanie Cortez said.
Many Twitter
users — among them, Kim Kardashian, Ice T, Katy Perry and McDonald’s corporate
account — have long pleaded for an edit button.
The company
said in April that it has been working on the feature since last year, a day
after Tesla CEO Elon Musk polled his followers on whether they wanted an edit
button. About three-quarters of the 4.4 million respondents said yes.
Later that
month, Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion with the promise that his
ownership would bring big changes to the service. He has since attempted to
back out of the deal citing concerns about fake accounts and whistleblower
allegations of poor cybersecurity, setting the stage for a bruising legal
battle over whether he has to go through with the purchase.
The premium
service costs $4.99 per month.