If you’re a regular Twitter user, the ability to schedule tweets rather than blast them out all at the same time can be really handy, and there are a variety of third-party plug-ins to help. Now it seems Twitter might be pushing out its own scheduler more widely.
As The Next Web reports, some users have already started seeing a schedule option appear on the interface: you can pick a specific date and time for your post, as well as see all the tweets you’ve currently got scheduled.
This is something that Twitter started testing last year, although the feature was never rolled out widely beyond a small trial group. The new functionality looks similar to the experiment we saw in November.
Now it appears more people are getting the option – though for the time being at least, it looks as though the feature is only available if you’re using Twitter on the desktop through a web browser.
The ever-evolving Twitter
We haven’t heard anything from Twitter itself yet, so it’s possible that this is just an extension of the original test: it may disappear as quickly as it arrived, or it may suddenly become available for everyone at once.
Besides being able to schedule tweets through various social media management tools, the feature is also available in TweetDeck – the power user web client that’s actually owned and run by Twitter itself.
That would suggest it’s not going to take too much software engineering know-how to switch the scheduler over to the main Twitter clients. Twitter has also been busy experimenting with new ways to show threads in recent days.
Being able to schedule tweets is undoubtedly useful – though it can cause a serious amount of social media embarrassment too, if it inadvertently becomes ill-timed, or looks ignorant of what everyone else is talking about on the network (Twitter moves fast, after all). There’s still no sign of an edit button though.