There are three things you should know about Twitter:

1. You should use Twitterrific on your Mac.
2. You only get 140 characters to make your point.
3. Once you’ve made your point, it can’t be edited.

It’s really frustrating when you type out a tweet quickly and send, only to realize that you’ve made an embarrassing typo or worse, said something you fundamentally regret. It’s too late, really. It’s probably already showing up on somebody’s tweet list and they’re gasping in horror. But it doesn’t have to live on in perpetuity!

While you can’t edit tweets, the folks at Twitter were kind enough to give us a sort of back-door method of editing, by allowing us to completely delete tweets that we don’t want to stick around.

So from time to time I found myself running to Twitter’s web interface after making a tweet. I’d find the little trash icon next to the item and click it. Not too much trouble, really. But I’m a Mac user, so of course I expect more.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could undo a tweet from right in Twitterrific? You can, with my spanking new script: Undo Tweet. This script requires FastScripts by default, but can be easily modified to use “display dialog” instead of the more user-friendly FastScripts message display.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you want to use FastScripts, or its free Lite counterpart, to set up your very own “Undo Tweet” functionality in Twitterrific. Here are the easy steps, once you’ve got FastScripts installed:

1. Download the Undo Tweet script, and open it with Script Editor to put your twitter name and password in.

2. Open Twitterrific and click its window to make sure it’s “active,” then create an app-specific scripts folder for it with FastScripts:

   

3. Drag the Undo Tweet script into the folder. Voila! You’ve got a Twitterrific-specific menu item for undoing tweets.

4. Select the menu item while holding down the Apple/Cmd key. Make sure that cmd key is down, or you’ll undo a tweet! This is a FastScripts trick for jumping right to the keyboard shortcut editor for any script. I chose Cmd-Shift-Z for mine. Just like Undo, but with a little more trouble since deleting a tweet is serious business.

   

And you’re done! Rest assured you can now easily undo any tweet. Let’s see how it looks in action.

First I write an embarrassing tweet.

Oh! That was embarrassing. Quick, press cmd-shift-Z! Since deleting the tweet can take a little while, I’m glad the author of this script was thoughtful enough to put up a little status message via FastScripts:

And a few seconds later…

Phew! A few people might have seen that tweet, but at least it’s permanently erased from the embarrassing annals of internet history.

Note that because of the way Twitterrific works, it won’t disappear from the visible list. Fear not, if the Undo Tweet script says it was deleted, then it’s because Twitter’s API claims it was deleted. Don’t run the script again or you’ll delete your previous tweet!.

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