Although Twitter hasn’t officially released its own the still long awaited tweet editing feature, a lingering question was how they would look embedded on other sites. Will they change dynamically when edited on Twitter, or will they remain as they were when they were created? OR will Twitter introduce something radical along with or instead of any of these options? Given how often tweets are embedded elsewhere, the answer to this question takes on almost philosophical proportions.
Well, we now have an idea of what edited tweets can look like when a site embeds them, thanks to the app explorer Jane Manchun Wong.
According to screenshots she posted this week, the embedded tweets will have tags indicating whether the author edited the tweet after the site posted it, keeping the original text intact.
Wong laid out several scenarios for how embeds and the tweet editing feature would work with each other. The first scenario shows a site that embeds an already edited tweet with the timestamp of the last edit. The second scenario shows a tweet that was edited after the site embedded it; the original version will display a “There’s a new version of the tweet” label below the edited tweet with a link to redirect readers to the latest version — on Twitter itself.
Embeds are important because they allow users to interact with Twitter even if they are not registered on the site. Also, many news reports rely on tweets, and if the content presented in a tweet changes, it can affect the entire story. Twitter is struggling with the formatting of embedded tweets that were removed after they are published on a site. Earlier this year, it started showing a blank tweet embed field instead of a block quote when an embedded tweet was removed. The company said this change is to respect the author’s wish to be removed and is working on showing a better message instead of a blank field for deleted tweets.
This would be useful for news sites, giving them a trail and record of what an account or person originally said, even if the tweet is later edited.
Regardless of how embedded tweets may look, in another tweet-editing find, reverse engineer Nima Ouji discovered that Twitter appears to be working on limited editing functionality. Specifically, you may only be able to edit a tweet within 30 minutes of posting it.
Earlier this year, Twitter confirmed this was working on an edit button to test it with its Twitter Blue premium service subscribers. But we haven’t heard of an official release date yet. The company grew the price of your paid plans last weekand many users have said the price is too high for what Twitter offers, but if the much-requested, much-contested edit button is included in the premium service, that may change their minds.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update the story if we hear back.
While we wait for Twitter to roll out the edit button feature, the sleuths’ findings have given us some insight into how the feature might work. In April, reverse engineers like Ouji and Alessandro Paluzzi tweeted about what the edit button in a tweet might look like.
Wong also highlighted Twitter’s approach at the time, noting that the company would not edit the text of the original tweet, instead creating a new identifier for the edited tweet and linking it to the original tweet.
In May, she made a note of the “There’s a new version of this tweet” tag that will likely appear next to the edited tweet once the feature is released.
Critically, all of these findings note that Twitter is still working on the interface that will show users different versions of an edited tweet. That means we don’t know what this might look like in the final version.
Twitter to launch lawsuit against Elon Musk because of its acquisition dispute with the tycoon in October. A poll Musk created asking people for their opinions on the edit button was one of his own more notable Twitter trolls (he misspelled both yes and no, ho ho ho!) when he was still in the honeymoon period of his love of acquisition.