Content Publishing, Mobile

Instagram finally allows for editing…Now Twitter needs to catch up

instagram-logo.jpgIt’s great that Instagram has added the ability to edit captions on their posts. It really is. As someone who’s made more than a few typos (including on client photos) because the “i” and “o” buttons are two close together on a QWERTY keyboard, I sing the praises of something like this.

Unfortunately there’s still a big missing piece here: Twitter editing.

See, if I make a typo in the Instagram caption now I can go back and fix it. But if I share that photo on Twitter it pulls over the caption as well. But when I fix the typo on Instagram that change isn’t then reflected on Twitter and right now Twitter does not let you edit Tweets after their published.

That increasingly seems like a slap in the face to users and publishers and less and less like Twitter working to maintain the sanctity of the stream, warts and all. Now don’t get me wrong, having made my bones in the Weblogs Inc “publish fast, correct later” system, the occasional type doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. But when it comes to brands, it’s a whole other set of considerations and these sorts of things can have a negative impact on reputation.

Right now Twitter (and its Vine app) are officially the outliers, the only major social networks that don’t allow for after-the-fact editing. And Twitter’s statements that post-publish editing would corrupt the “right now”-ness of the stream and allow for abuse rings increasingly hollow as they continue to talk about tweaking the stream to accommodate some sort of algorithm-based display.