Twitter finally adds the ability to edit tweets - but there's a catch

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Twitter is finally rolling out one of its most-requested features: the ability to edit a tweet after it's been posted (a power Facebook users have had since forever).

The ability is coming later this month. Twitter posted a teaser tweet overnight.

But it will only be available to those who stump up for the premium Twitter Blue service.

And to add insult to injury, Twitter recently announced it's increasing the price of a Blue subscription from US$2.99 to US$4.99 ($8.05) per month.

If you are willing to stump up - and New Zealand, along with Australia and the US will be among the first handful of countries to get the feature - you'll get a 30-minute window to amend a tweet.

The edited tweet will show up with a label showing a timestamp of modification. People reading the tweet can tap the label to view the editing history of the tweet.

I took out a Twitter Blue subscription to give it a whirl after it was first introduced but quit in January after just two months.

There was one premium feature that appealed to me - being able to edit the menu bar, and substitute a Bookmarks icon in place of Spaces (Twitter's patchy Discord knockoff).

And there was one feature I could see appealing to social media professionals: the power to post a video up to 10 minutes long (the free version restricts you to two minutes, 20 seconds).

The rest was chaff, including a 30-second window to edit a tweet before it went live (of course, there's nothing to stop you taking half a minute to proofread a tweet for free) and a few different colour options (which should be free).

Would the ability to edit tweets, for real, be enough to draw me back? Probably not. It's annoying to pay for a feature other platforms offer for free. I think I'll just delete a tweet and start again.

I'm not sure that buyer-in-the-wings (or, for now, in the court room) Elon Musk will be impressed.

Speaking of Musk, I'm not a big fan of his plan for more-or-less unfettered posts if he ever does take the reins. But he has proposed a number of major changes would reinvigorate Twitter, including making the platform's algorithms transparent and publishing all of its code on Github, making it open source.

That's the sort of kick in the pants Twitter really needs to regain its mojo. (Remember the days when every live event included a Twitter wall? No? Well it was a while back now.)

Twitter recently reported a loss of US$270m for its ts June quarter, from its year ago loss of US$65m, as revenue dipped to US$1.18b from $1.19b a year ago, and was below the average analyst estimate of US$1.32b.

A slowing ad market, and uncertainty around the Musk deal, were blamed.

Twitter's average daily active users increased to 237.8m from 229m in the first quarter and 206 million a year ago.

The company hasn't revealed how many of its users subscribe to Twitter Blue.