Twitter is working on an Undo Send timer for tweets

Twitter may soon let you retract a tweet you just sent to fix a typo, make edits or cancel it altogether. That’s according to reverse engineering app researcher Jane Manchun Wong who has managed to unearth a work-in-progress interface for an unreleased Undo Send feature.


STORY HIGHLIGHTS:

  • Twitter is currently testing this.
  • You have about five seconds to retract a sent tweet.
  • Twitter could ultimately can the feature.
  • No word on an Edit button yet.

An illustration of Twitter's bird icon

An Undo Send timer for tweets

The feature appears to work as you’d expect.

Once a tweet has been published, the user has about five seconds to retract the tweet should they need to fix a typo, change the wording or retract the post completely. A reverse progress bar inside an Undo button indicates the time left to retract a tweet.

Jane has published a short animation on Twitter showing this feature in action.

Twitter is working on new features all the time and some people worry that Undo Send could become a paid feature. On the other hand, the fact that Twitter is now testing this with a subset of its users strongly suggests that Undo Send will likely be free to use after all.

What about an Edit button?

Twitter remains mum on an Edit button that many people have been requesting for years now. This would allow you to update or completely change your tweet at any time after it’s live.

How to download your entire Twitter history

According to Twitter’s boss Jack Dorsey, Twitter is considering a feature that would permit the original and edited version of a tweet to coexist. Recode published Dorsey’s comments on such a feature while speaking at a Goldman Sachs event in February 2019.

How do we enable people to quickly go back or to any tweet, whether it be years back or today, and show that original tweet—kind of like a quote retweet, a retweet with a comment—and to add some context and some color on what they might have tweeted or what they might have meant.

By doing so you might imagine that the original tweet then would not have the sort of engagement around it. Like you wouldn’t be able to retweet the original tweet, for instance. You would just show the clarification, you would be able to retweet the clarification, so it always carries around with it that context. That’s one approach.

Dorsey stopped short of saying when this clarity feature might arrive, if ever.