Though Twitter hasn’t officially launched its anticipated edit tweet feature, it has generated a lot of questions on how it’ll look when embedded on other sites.
Some of the questions include, will it dynamically change if edited on Twitter, or will it remain as it was when created? And is Twitter releasing something radical alongside rather than either of the options?
With how tweets embed elsewhere, these questions’ answers may take philosophical proportions. The truth is that we now see how edited tweets may appear if a site embeds them, all thanks to Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher.
This week, Jane Manchun Wong posted screenshots that say embedded tweets would have markers showing when the author has edited its tweet after the site posted it, keeping the original text intact.
The app researcher presented some scenarios on how the embeds and edit tweet functions would work. For the first scenario, it shows a site embedding an already edited tweet using the last edit timestamp.
The 2nd scenario shows a tweet being edited after the site embedded it; the original version shows a “There’s a new version of the tweet,” which is labeled under the edited tweet with a link to redirect readers to the latest version on Twitter.
Why the embeds?
Embeds are crucial because they offer users a chance to talk to Twitter even if they’re not registered on the site. Also, several news reports depend on tweets, and when the content represented in a tweet changes, it may impact the entire story.
The social media app has equally struggled when formatting its embedded tweets that are removed after they’re posted on a site.
In early 2022, Twitter began showing a blank tweet embed box rather than a blockquote when embedded tweets were removed. The app disclosed that this change is to regard the author’s desire to remove it. And it’s also working on displaying a better message rather than a blank box for deleted tweets.
This will be useful for news sites, providing them with a trail, plus a record of what account originally tweeted even when the tweet is later edited.
Meanwhile, reverse engineer Nima Owji has discovered that regardless of how embedded tweets may appear in another edit tweet-related find, Twitter appears to be working on its editing limited functionality.
In particular, you can only edit a tweet under 30 minutes of posting it. Meanwhile, in early 2022, the company confirmed it’s working on its edit button to test with its Twitter Blue premium service subscribers.