Twitter needs an “Edit” function

June 27, 2009

I love Twitter; honestly, I do; but the lack of an Edit function is really starting to piss me off.

Like most of the internet on Thursday night (UK time), I was following the news of Michael Jackson’s shocking and untimely death. One of the first substantive articles I came across was on the LA Times blog, reporting that the star had been taken to hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest.

I shortened the URL using bit.ly, and Twittered the following:

Even as my finger was hitting the Return key, my subconscious spell-checker was shouting a warning, but too late.

It seems that I wasn’t alone:

…the trending topics list on Twitter is a rotating set of call-outs to the late King of Pop. At first it was shocking to see how many people are capable of operating Twitter, but not spelling “Michael” correctly.

Over on my Friendfeed, however, it was a different matter. My Tweets get cross-posted there, but Friendfeed allows me to edit anything I post into my stream:

See the difference? Here we have the “same” post from Twitter, but edited to correct my stupid spelling mistake.

Like  Friendfeed, Twitter is, at heart, an online publishing tool, so the ability to edit a post after publication is basic functionality, and something that Twitter has been lacking for too long now.

Posted in Twitter, microblogging