Have you ever
had that moment where you’ve hit send on a text and wished you could take it back, knowing fully well
that you can’t? Plenty of people have sent that drunken text, or angry rant, or
the accidental text to the group that their boss is also on, much to their
dismay. However, now there may be a sliver of hope for the ‘texters with
regret’.
WhatsApp has finally
rolled out its most anticipated feature – ‘Delete for Everyone’, which allows
the more than one billion users of the service to revoke their messages, in
case they sent those to a wrong person or a group. You can now delete messages
for everyone or just for yourself. However, the feature, which WhatsApp has
been working on for almost a year, only allows you to delete messages for
everyone for up to seven minutes after sending.
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One relieved user, in
particular, is Jason Almeida, from Varca, who shares his experience, saying “I
came back from work at 3 AM all excited, as I was supposed to be playing FIFA
after a 12 hour shift. I was so happy that I had texted my cousins who were
busy enjoying some fine scotch that I just got back and wouldn’t be working the
next day. Let’s put it down to peer pressure that I ended up having to go join
them at 3:30 AM… it was fun but ouch! For this latest development, let’s just
say, thank you WhatsApp!”
“Once seven
minutes have passed, there is no way to delete messages for everyone,”
Facebook-owned WhatsApp said in its updated FAQ on Friday. “In order for
messages to be successfully deleted for everyone, both you and your recipient
must be using the latest version of WhatsApp for Android, iPhone or Windows
Phone,” the micro-blogging platform added.
“Deleting
messages for everyone allows you to delete specific messages you have sent to either
a group or an individual chat. This is particularly useful if you sent a
message to the wrong chat or if the message you sent contains a mistake,”
WhatsApp has declared. Messages you successfully delete for everyone will be
replaced with “This message was deleted” in your recipients’ chats.
Similarly, if you see “This message was deleted” in a chat, it means
that the sender deleted their message for everyone.
Some cases are, of
course, humorous. Jeffrey Manuel, an institution in himself in Goa shares one
such case, in good humour. “There was one time when a manager of my team
building firm messaged me saying ‘Hi Jeff. We are guys in slippers and shorts.
Can we enter Cohiba?’ I meant to say ‘No. You can’t.’ Instead, it came out as
‘No. You…’ Let’s just say that that it was a word that sounds very much like
‘can’t’.”
For other (more
cautious) users, it’s also a case of the proverbial sigh of relief. The need
for text vigilance can now be abated by this new feature. Revellino Fernandes
from Loutolim points out, with a sigh of relief. “I’ve always been constantly
vigilant about what I type, who I send it to, and what not. In an age where
screenshots are popular, who knows how things get blown out of proportion? I
guess I can relax a little now,” he says, laughing in the process.
Your
texting fingers have just been given a reprieve, but knowing our tendency to
love human error, once can be certain that there’s only so much that technology
can do to save us.
