Although there are 140 characters (or less) in a Twitter message, it’s easy to make a spelling mistake – probably because most posts are mini-bursts of thought or news snapped off in a few seconds.
It’s only after you hit the “Update” button that you realize there’s a spelling mistake or a word that shouldn’t be there. But it’s too late, you can’t take it back so the post sits there as an unfortunate grammatical embarrassment for awhile before it disappears into the Twitter-sphere.
But wouldn’t it be great if you could edit your posts after hitting “Update”? Ideally, there would be an “edit” tool that would give you, say, two minutes to fix your spelling, add a word, or even delete the post completely. At the very least, it would be a great face-saving tool and let you be as accurate as possible.
I guess the easiest approach would be a service that would delay your posts by a few minutes, giving you enough time to fix anything. But it would be even better if Twitter could integrate an “edit” tool within its publishing suite.
Does anyone know of an editing tool that’s available now? If so, leave a comment. I’m sure many people would appreciate knowing if something like this exists.
8 Comments
Mark: I don't think one exists but in Plurk there was the ability (or perhaps still is) to edit your post within a certain time delay. That would be best for Twitter but would mess up a bunch of clients i think.
Yes, you're right about being able to edit posts within Plurk.
For now, I have a checker in my browser that highlights misspellings.
You can just go onto Twitter and delete the comment and repost it…
I mostly us Twitstat Mobiel, http://www.twitstat.com/m/,”target=”_blank”>http://http://www.twitstat.com/m/,whichhas an editing function for your tweets. Besides that, it has a number of functionalities that are missing in twitter.com. E.g. for forwarding links directly to your delicious (with tag possibility), forwarding tweets via email, filtering options to block or pass tweets from certain peeps or with certain hastags.
Twitstat Mobile is developed and maintained by @michielb and also has a uservoice option. So if you're missing certain functions you can easily pass your ideas to the developer.
Though developed for mobile use, it also works great on a desktop.
Which does not save me from perfectly spelt grammar mistakes, or my fingers skipping a world my brain sees. A preview function would be nice. I wonder if there is a greasemonkey script for this?
The easiest thing to do right now after a shocking typo is to instantly highlight and copy your message, then delete it and re-post with the edit. It's a far better system than leaving the message up and re-posting it with any corrections.
Otherwise, I agree an edit option makes sense, but one assumes it might bog down the platform massively, with folk going back and correcting things indefinitely (or changing opinions/statements when they've been made to look foolish or wrong).
Maybe a happy compromise is you have 120 seconds to edit your last message before it goes out into the great ether.
I like the idea of a limited-time edit option! But then again, I try not to worry too much about typos. The 140 character limit sorta encourages some creative (read: poor) spelling & grammar anyway…