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Could editing be coming to Tweets?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has asked the platform's users which new or improved features they'd like to see in 2017.

Michelle Starr Science editor
Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming about bats.
Michelle Starr

You think you've crafted the perfect Tweet. You hit the big blue button to set it live -- only to realise you've made an "unpresidented" typo. Editing is something many of us would like to see on microblogging social network Twitter, and as it turns out, CEO Jack Dorsey would too. On Thursday, he asked Twitter users to come at him with ideas for new features and improvements for the platform.

Several users requested the ability to edit Tweets, and Dorsey responded that such a feature is "def needed." However, implementation could be tricky. If the ability to edit the Tweet is limited to a short window after publishing, that is one thing, but if you could edit the Tweet any time after publishing, Dorsey says a changelog would be required.

This has already been implemented in Facebook, where you can click the word "Edited" to see the changes made to an edited post or comment. On reddit, an asterisk appears next to the timestamp if to indicate a post or comment has been edited after a three-minute window. This helps minimise abuse of the edit feature, whereby a poster could edit a post to change the meaning.

Other features requested by the Twitter userbase included better tools for handling abuse (Dorsey said this is Twitter's "top priority"), bookmarking and topic channels.