Twitter has been on a tear with new product features, such as Moments, which just launched yesterday. But of all the new features, one that users have been wanting for years still hasn't arrived. Anyone who has posted a tweet only to see an annoying typo as soon as it went up knows this pain: why can't we edit our tweets like we can with Facebook posts?
According to Twitter head of product Kevin Weil, editing tweets is easier said than done. When faced with the question of when we'll be able to do so during Recode's Code Mobile conference, Weil noted that that wasn't so much a technical hurdle, but more about how it can change the context of a tweet that might have been embedded or shared elsewhere. This makes sense: if someone changes the content (and therefore the context) of a tweet after it's been embedded in an article or retweeted by other users, it could change the meaning of the article or the intent of the person that retweeted it. That's even more of an issue if photos or other media are attached or removed from a tweet after the fact.
That isn't to say Twitter isn't looking at the option — newly-minted CEO Jack Dorsey responded to none other than Kim Kardashian's request for the feature calling it a "great idea" earlier this year. There are a few ways Twitter could tackle its unique issue with editing tweets, perhaps by only allowing edits for a short period after a tweet is posted. But with all of the other things already on Twitter's road map, editing tweets doesn't appear to be coming imminently.