Twitter Tests New Layout for Images, Considers Adding Limited Time Tweet Editing

This could be interesting – Twitter is currently experimenting with a new image format, which would take up the whole horizontal space in-stream, eliminating the current, rounded borders on your photos.

As you can see in this example, shared by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong, the new layout stretches the whole width of the feed, which, really, gives it a bit more of a Facebook vibe, but it does look better than the current tweet image presentation.

And apparently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey agrees. He posted this response to Wong’s original tweet sharing her discovery.

Which is a tacit confirmation that it is coming, which could be an important change to note for your tweeted images and processes, to ensure that you maximize the extra width, when it becomes available.

On another front, Twitter’s also given users some new hope around tweet editing, with Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour posing this question in a tweet poll.

Twitter’s been talking about this possible addition for years, with Dorsey himself explaining how it might work in an interview with Joe Rogan in 2019.

“So when you send a tweet it goes to the world instantaneously. You can’t take it back. You could build it as such so maybe we introduce a 5-second to 30-second delay in the sending. And within that window, you can edit. The issue with going longer than that is it takes that real-time nature of the conversational flow out of it”

Beykpour is talking minutes with this new iteration, but the idea is the same, which could become a possible addition for its Twitter Blue subscription offering that’s currently available to users in Canada and Australia. 

Twitter Blue already offers an ‘undo send’ option, which enables users to retract their sent tweets within up to 30 seconds of posting. Would editing, within a broader time limit, enhance the option even more?

In some ways, it’s interesting to see Twitter continuing to explore new ideas for its monetization tools, but in others, it does feel like it’s throwing up every idea that it can, in the hope that at least a few things stick. Just last year, Dorsey said that tweet editing wasn’t coming, which seemed to be the end of it – but the fact that it’s now resurrecting that discussion seems like, maybe Twitter’s running out of ideas to entice people to pay for its stuff.

Or maybe, it’s just going to leave no stone left unturned. The platform’s management is under pressure to improve its results, after years of relative stagnation, and it’s set some ambitious growth targets that it likely needs to meet – or it’s quite possible that Dorsey and Co. will be ousted by the company board.

Maybe, then, Twitter needs to throw the kitchen sink at its new subscription tools. And maybe, possibly, tweet editing could be the key lure that gets more people in.

Either way, it likely doesn’t suggest that people are flocking to Twitter Blue just yet.

And finally, Twitter has also added a new auto captions option for voice tweets.

Remember those two days when voice tweets were a thing, then everybody forgot that they even existed? Well they still serve elements of Twitter’s user base, and captions will provide another way to facilitate expanded usage.