This Twitter client will let you edit your tweets (sort of)
This Twitter client will let you edit your tweets (sort of)
Twitter has an on-again, off-again relationship with its most requested feature: the edit button. A year ago it was hinting that the feature might be introduced, even going as far as to explain how it might work, before adding that it will “probably never do it” at the start of 2020.
But it’s such a popular request that another client – Brizzly – has stepped up to fill in the gap… sort of. It even got a shout out from Twitter’s official developer account:
Our friends @Brizzly are back! We’re excited about their new Tweet compose & auto-deletion tools. They even built…an edit feature!🙃 Check them out 👇 https://t.co/p7Hbt4qxPF
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) March 10, 2020
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Of course no app can actually let you edit tweets if Twitter doesn’t support the feature natively, so Brizzly+ – a $6 per month subscription version of Brizzly – does it via smoke and mirrors. In fact, it’s identical to one of the solutions Jack Dorsey suggested that Twitter had considered internally: users simply set a delay of up to ten minutes before tweets are posted, and in that time they can edit them to their hearts’ content.
If you still manage to spot a typo after the ten minutes have elapsed and the tweet is out in the wild, Brizzly+ has a feature it calls redo. Pressing this copies the post into a new text field for you to edit and then, once posted, the app will delete the original leaving just the corrected tweet standing.
Related: How to spot false information on Twitter
Neither of these are a substitute for a true edit button, of course, but given what Twitter has said in the past it’s likely as good as you’ll get. And for the record, the company does have quite good reasons for blocking the change – the most important of which is to counter the spread of misinformation and fake news.
“You might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that, and then an hour later you completely change the content of that tweet,” Dorsey explained. “The person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different.”
Until someone at Twitter HQ comes up with a way around this problem, Brizzly+ might be the best hope for the typo-prone with $6 per month to spare.
