Wednesday, October 16, 2013

The Future 140: How to Pre

If you've been waiting for a way to draft or schedule tweets using Twitter's web interface, you're in luck. This week the company announced that basically any user do just that. All you have to do is tweet from ads.twitter.com. The URL has a more fully featured tweet text box, including options to pay to promote your tweet, and most importantly, to schedule tweets for the future.


While the new features are really intended for marketing types, they're available to everyone, even if you have no intention of ever paying Twitter. You can find a list of your previously scheduled tweets under the tab labeled 'Creative,' which is currently the closest thing Twitter's web interface has to a drafts folder. Of course, this isn't the first tweet-scheduling service - pros have used Tweetdeck, Buffer, and HootSuite for years - but it's the first one directly integrated into Twitter's main product. You can schedule images too (something frustratingly difficult to do with TweetDeck).


While we at WIRED's Gadget Lab think scheduled tweets are generally wack, why let the 'social media ninjas' have all the fun? You can schedule tweets for your loved ones' birthdays (they'll never know you let a computer remember for you), share photos at specific times, or use it to simply space out your keen insights into human nature. Just don't forget: If there's a big event happening on Twitter, you may want to pull those scheduled tweets, lest you be exposed as a tone-deaf yahoo lacking the creativity to think up 140 characters in real-time.


[ ads.twitter.com]


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