Twitter, the Elon Musk-owned platform which is accelerating efforts to compete shoulder to shoulder with social media giants like Instagram and Facebook, is incorporating a new change. Starting Wednesday, June 7, Twitter Blue subscribers will have an hour to edit already posted tweets, a window that was restricted to only 30 minutes since the feature’s launch in October 2022. Elon Musk, the current owner and chief technology officer (CTO) of the micro-blogging app, aims to drive more capital into the company by offering most requested features by Twitter users over the years, as part of the Twitter Blue subscription.
The official account of Twitter Blue posted an announcement to its 571,000 followers on Wednesday, confirming that paid subscribers will indeed get an hour before their chance to edit a posted tweet slips away.
Blue subscribers now have up to 1 hour to edit their Tweets.
— Twitter Blue (@TwitterBlue) June 7, 2023
The edit option for tweets was amongst the most requested features from Twitter users even when Jack Dorsey served as the CEO of the social networking company he founded in 2006.
When Musk acquired Twitter last year for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,63,110 crore), he decided to load Twitter’s paid subscription — the Twitter Blue service — with special features that would entice users to purchase this service for $8 (roughly Rs. 900) per month.
The billionaire’s aim was clear — to drive more funds into Twitter’s treasury, which previously was not seeing enough profits. Musk ended up firing a big chunk of Twitter’s global staff as part of an internal restructuring process, in order to balance the platform’s financial condition and trim down costs.
That is when the edit feature for published tweets was rolled out for Twitter Blue subscribers.
Musk’s tactics to onboard more paid subscribers, however, do not seem to be working as expected.
Citing a newsletter by its editor Alex Heath, The Verge reported that several Twitter Blue subscribers have been complaining that some features of the package are not functional.
Moreover, Twitter Blue’s reduced ads feature, which has been heavily advertised since February this year, has not yet been rolled-out.
The social networking platform has, however, added other features to tweak the service to cater to user requests.
In May for instance, Twitter announced that it would let its users get the picture-in-picture mode for videos, making it easy to scroll down the timelines without having to wait for the video to stop playing.
Previously, the social networking platform announced the launch of encrypted DMs feature, which is aimed at securing messages exchanged via Twitter DMs.