The edit button is coming to Twitter

The edit button is coming to Twitter
FILE PHOTO: People holding mobile phones are silhouetted against a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo in this illustration picture taken September 27, 2013. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo

If you’re a Twitter junkie, you know the struggles of not having an edit button. Whether it’s a typo, a misquote, or you just want to update your tweet to show current info, so far it’s been impossible to use the same edit feature that pretty much every other app known to humanity has figured out how to introduce.

Well, it’s finally here. Or, at least, it’s on its way. Twitter just announced it’s started slowly rolling out the edit button, first to a small sample of people and soon to all those Twitter Blue subscribers out there. (Fancy features for free? You must be new here if you thought that would happen.)

In fairness, there have been some good reasons why Twitter hasn’t had an edit button yet. For one, someone could post something that went viral (like that heartwarming video of Shane Hawkins playing his recently passed father’s drums on stage with Foo Fighters) only to later change it to something significantly worse (say, a video rant about politics). Suddenly, everyone who quote tweeted the original saying, “So heartwarming,” has some explaining to do.

To help deal with that, each time a tweet is edited, there will be a little icon at the bottom that says so and will show you the history of that tweet. That way, if something seems a little off when you see it, you can do some investigating to find the original and know that, in fact, your friend from high school does not actually believe that this crazy political rant is “so heartwarming.”

There’s also the concern that people could use it to go back and clean up their old tweets without just getting rid of them, which would pretty much ruin the whole point of a tweet as being an indicator of how a user felt at a specific time. So, Twitter says edits are only going to be able to be made within 30 minutes of their initial publication.

Basically, the tweet is changing, and truth be told, we asked for it. But only time will tell if the edit button is flying too close to the sun for the little blue Twitter bird to handle.