Despite the fact we all had far too many networks and notifications to check about six years ago, humans seem to be suckers for expanding their ‘need to check’ lists pretty much exponentially. What this means is that there’s now a good chance you receive information- be that personal or professional- through a variety of platforms.
One of which is likely to be WhatsApp. The software is perfect for ongoing group messages, the sharing and dissemination of ideas, an constantly updating whiteboard of ingenuity, if you will. That, and random comedy GIFs that brighten up all our days.
There has long been a problem though, and it impacts on every single user, from the drunken and jilted ex looking for redemption, to the member of the team that thinks they’ve struck the motherlode when it comes to problems solving that unsolvable problem that has been plaguing the office for months. Sometimes we send something and really, desperately want to take it back. Immediately.
[Tweet “#WhatsApp has (finally) added a delete button, and @SmokingGunPR seem pretty happy about it”]
While our inability to do this isn’t restricted to WhatsApp– Facebook Messenger is also guilty of overlooking the Undo button- very few people actually use Messenger for anything other than arranging the location of a pint on a Friday evening. In contrast, our reliance on WhatsApp for everything rom socialising to content planning, is only growing.
As such when news hit that a new ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature is being rolled out on the largest version of the app in question, we couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. Here’s how it works…
You post something to WhatsApp, immediately regret it, hit either the ‘Delete For Me’ or ‘Delete For Everyone’ button, and it vanishes- just for yourself, or for all accounts in the thread. Providing nobody saw it within the split second between post and erase you’re scot free, and in total you have up to seven minutes to delete content before it’s committed to the group for all eternity. Everything from images to GIFs and text can be removed, and replaced with a much less problematic ‘This Message Was Deleted’ script.
In short, now we can relax a bit and wait for Messenger to catch up.

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