It’s been the most highly requested Twitter feature upgrade for years, and now that request inches ever so closer to becoming reality, with initial testing of Twitter’s coming edit function set to be available only to Twitter Blue subscribers. Based on this introductory screen shared by Alessandro Paluzzi, the new option, which Twitter has been working on for several months, now looks to be launched as part of Twitter Blue’s accessible monthly add-on tools for $2.99.

Exclusive Edits

That’s the plan for now, at least. Twitter also recently announced a price increase for Twitter Blue, taking the subscription option up to $4.99 from $2.99, which does seem odd, seeing as how Twitter’s literally jacking the price up by 67% with no additional features whatsoever.

But perhaps this was in anticipation of Tweet editing becoming available? Just how likely is it to boost interest in Twitter Blue? As noted, an edit button has long been the most requested Twitter addition, dating as far back as the reign of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who even said that he had been pressured for years to add the option to try and improve the service. In 2020, Dorsey seemingly killed off all chances for an edit option by introducing a function that would eventually be the ‘Undo Tweet’ option, which is also currently part of Twitter Blue. Hopes were reignited in April of this year when potential new Twitter owner Elon Musk Tweeted a poll. Shortly after becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder, they later confirmed that development on an edit option had begun.

Since then, various leaked updates by app researchers and reverse engineers, including details on how Twitter will display Tweet editing history and how it will deal with embedded Tweets of potentially edited content, as well as highlighting when a Tweet has been edited. These were all considered definite restrictions for the option back then, with Twitter noting that the relative ‘shortness’ of Tweets makes them highly vulnerable to misinterpretation, even through the tiniest of edits.

Now, it’s just a matter of ‘will Tweet editing deliver as expected?’. Realistically speaking, it probably won’t. We’re not saying that it won’t come in handy, only that the changes mentioned above tend to get blown out of proportion, with the initial hype easily dying down shortly after release.

The Wrap

As a case in point, almost all trends on Twitter are highly fleeting. When longer Tweets were first introduced, they were considered a disaster, ‘til a week later when they suddenly weren’t. What happens is that when Twitter releases a heavily requested feature, it’s the biggest and most important update at the time, until it isn’t. Tweet editing doesn’t seem like it’ll stray much from the same path either. Still, even that small window of extreme hype might be enough for Twitter to squeeze in a few extra numbers. If more people end up going for the $4.99 Blue subscription, then Twitter might even see a big spike in revenue, even if only for a limited time.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3BX5CVk