Twitter today announced the official launch of a new Bookmarks feature, which is designed to allow Twitter users to save tweets for later access.
All tweets now feature an updated "share" icon that's used for both bookmarking and sharing tweets, and Twitter says the share icon is meant to make it easier to save and share privately or publicly.
Bookmarking a tweet to save it for later can be done by tapping the share icon under a tweet and then choosing the "Add Tweet to Bookmarks" option. All saved tweets are located under the "Bookmarks" option that can be accessed from a person's profile icon menu.
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Article that you want to read later? Save the Tweet with Bookmarks, and come back to it whenever you want. Only you can see your Bookmarks. pic.twitter.com/fM2QLcOYNF — Twitter (@Twitter) February 28, 2018
Twitter Bookmarks are private, so no one can see which tweets have been bookmarked, unlike the "Like" option, which, prior to Bookmarks, has been a preferred method of preserving tweets.
The new Bookmarks feature was first introduced in October and was developed as part of a company-wide Hack Week. Ahead of the debut of Bookmarks, Twitter shared regular details on its development.
Twitter says Bookmarks are now rolling out globally on Twitter for iOS and Android, Twitter Lite, and mobile.twitter.com.
Top Rated Comments
1. Tweet "like/retweet this if you adore puppies".
2. Wait for 1,000,000 likes/retweets.
3. Edit tweet to "like/retweet this if you adore Hitler".
The system only works if tweet content is set in stone. The only other options are to have the system ask those million people who liked/retweeted "do you still agree with this edited content?" (and how do you count that person's previous "vote" in the time between the edit and when they answer the question? and how many people will bother to answer the question? do you hide their retweet until they re-approve it? what about comments posted against the original tweet or the retweets? do you bury each and every one of those until the tweeters re-approve them? you could end up with half of new content in some sort of edit approval limbo).
Or, they could just have edited tweets lose all their likes/retweets once they're edited. In which case the person would have to post their message again to start things over, which is essentially the system we already have now.
And there's no practical way to handle "but this is just a minor typo I wanna correct", because AI is not yet to the point that it can fully comprehend the minor subtleties and implications of human language, there's no practical way to have truly disinterested humans sanity check changes to the hundreds of thousands of tweets that people would want to change, and there's no way to prevent someone from asserting to an automated system that changing "puppies" to "Hitler" is correction of a minor typo. You can't even say "oh, but it's just a punctuation fix, like adding a comma" - consider the difference between "let's eat, grandma!" and "let's eat grandma!".
The only workable solution is to type your tweet, take your hands off the keyboard, look at the sky or out the window for a moment, look back at the screen, and read what you wrote (out loud if necessary) and see if it actually says what you mean... and then click okay/post/tweet.
As to the idea of "well, you should be able to edit it if it's only been a couple minutes"... why not just write an updated/corrected tweet and delete the original, if it's only been a minute? If nobody has read/reacted to the original, that should handle things just fine. If people have read/reacted to the original, then you shouldn't be able to go back and change "puppies" to "Hitler" (or "Hitler" to "puppies") - time to write a new/corrected tweet and consider the implications of deleting the old one.
Plus, now that tweets are used for dispensing official government edicts, being able to edit history after the fact is a Bad Idea.