Everyone’s been there. A rushed, fat-fingered message to your friend, reminding them to bring the “monkey” they owe you for that concert ticket.
There are, of course, far worse autocorrect calamities, which is why mobile messaging companies the world over are caving to demands for remediation tools.
Today, Asian messaging giant Line revealed it was appeasing its 200 million users with a new feature that lets them “unsend” a message within a 24-hour period, both in group chats and one-to-one conversations. This is in addition to the existing “delete” feature, which allows users to remove a message on their own side, though who really wants to delete a message just from their own device?
Line’s move echoes those of several other messaging companies in 2017. Back in January, Telegram began allowing message removals within a 48-hour period. This option was introduced eight months after a new feature that lets Telegram users edit messages after they’ve been sent.
Back in October, Facebook-owned WhatsApp caved to popular demand by finally allowing its billion-plus global users to permanently remove a messagefrom all recipients within seven minutes of sending it. Sure, that won’t give you enough time to reverse a drunken retort from the night before, but it at least allows you to backtrack on a hastily constructed utterance sent in the heat of the moment.
Listen up
So it seems messaging companies the world over are listening to their users, who have made it clear they want to be able to remedy any regrettable message they’ve sent, whether by editing or deleting it.Against this backdrop, Twitter yesterday announced a new feature in support of threads, something that will basically better enable tweet storms. But whenever Twitter rolls out a new feature, the same response comes in droves — “nice new feature, but what we really want is the ability to edit tweets.”
