Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Andrew Feinberg/Flickr
Facebook doesn’t offer several fixes for embarrassing posts. Klutzes who insert typos into their posts, make inadvertent double entendres, or misapply words they don’t recognize ought to either leave their flawed messages intact or take the drastic step of nuking them entirely, a move that can draw far more focus than the original mistake.
But that could be altering. A Facebook product manager, speaking on a panel at a journalism conference yesterday, implied that customers may soon be able to edit their status updates, according to a Los Angeles Occasions story and a New York Instances reporter’s tweet. Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik hinted that editing status messages is a natural next step in the social network’s evolution. “On Facebook, you can edit captions and you can edit comments,” Lavrusik reportedly mentioned. “You can infer what we will do subsequent.”
Lavrusik didn’t back off the insinuation when approached following the panel by the LA Times, “I can inform you that customers have asked for [the capacity to edit statuses] a lot,” he said, “and a lot of times that’s how we develop issues.”
A Facebook spokesperson, meanwhile, was noncommittal, telling Wired Business that status post editing “is a thing we might contemplate for the future,” but that the social network has “nothing to announce at this time.”
For years, Facebook posts have been immutable, starting with the “Wall” function in 2004 and continuing through to the “News Feed” launched in 2006. This was really much by style, according to former Facebook engineering director Yishan Wong, who explained the company’s thinking on the Q&A hub Quora:
There truly is also significantly spam/abuse potential. Like, I could make a post that says “Who likes ice cream?” and when 20 of my close friends say “I do!” I could then alter it to say “Who likes gay sex?”
…Changing the conversation just breaks so many real-life social expectations about how a conversation functions
Facebook appears to be moving away from this position lately it launched comment editing this previous June, and now comes this hint about customers possibly becoming in a position to edit full posts. Perhaps the business has come up with a way to prevent men and women from using the editing function to rewrite background as well much. Or possibly Facebook just decided its all-also-clumsy users want all the aid they can get.
