Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Andrew Feinberg/Flickr
Facebook doesn’t offer many fixes for embarrassing posts. Klutzes who insert typos into their posts, make inadvertent double entendres, or misapply words they don’t understand must either leave their flawed messages intact or take the drastic step of nuking them entirely, a move that can draw more attention than the original mistake.
But that could be changing. A Facebook product manager, speaking on a panel at a journalism conference yesterday, implied that users may soon be able to edit their status updates, according to a Los Angeles Times story and a New York Times 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 said. “You can infer what we will do next.”
Lavrusik didn’t back off the insinuation when approached after the panel by the LA Times, “I can tell you that users have asked for [the ability to edit statuses] a lot,” he said, “and a lot of times that’s how we develop things.”
A Facebook spokesperson, meanwhile, was noncommittal, telling Wired Business that status post editing “is something we might consider 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” feature in 2004 and continuing through to the “News Feed” launched in 2006. This was very much by design, according to former Facebook engineering director Yishan Wong, who explained the company’s thinking on the Q&A hub Quora:
There really is too much spam/abuse potential. Like, I could make a post that says “Who likes ice cream?” and once 20 of my friends say “I do!” I could then change it to say “Who likes gay sex?”
…Changing the conversation just breaks so many real-life social expectations about how a conversation works
Facebook seems to be moving away from this position lately; it launched comment editing this past June, and now comes this hint about users possibly being able to edit full posts. Maybe the company has come up with a way to prevent people from using the editing feature to rewrite history too much. Or maybe Facebook just decided its all-too-clumsy users need all the help they can get.
