Finally WhatsApp Sees the Light!
For different reasons, I started to use Telegram chat App more than a year ago.
One of these reasons was the fact Facebook bought WhatsApp and although Facebook and the WhatsApp team clearly stated they will not use WhatsApp for advertisement purposes, Facebook still has the meta data such as with whom you chat and with whom you place phone calls and when and where and who your favourite communications partners are and so on.
Another reason were the features of Telegram, including the possibility to delete a message in a chat which will not only remove the message on the sender end, but also has the option to delete it on the receiver end.
Delete is an Option
Last week WhatsApp started rolling out the delete feature and as nerdy as I am, I immediately wanted to test this. And indeed, with success I was able to delete a message through the chat menu you get when holding your finger for a little time on the chat message you want to delete. It provides the option to delete on the sender end only, or on both sides. Exactly the way Telegram has it implemented. Still, Telegram is better, since it allows the user to 'edit' a chat, while WhatsApp only allows deleting the chat message. The work around is to first copy the chat message, then delete the chat message, and then paste the copied chat message into a new empty chat message field, and then edit this before sending. This work around works, but is still not as user friendly as the edit feature in Telegram.
Note: WhatsApp has a timer on the delete function. They say this is 7 minutes after sending the message; The test I did showed this might be about right, but I didn't do a thorough testing with exact timing.
The ability to delete a chat message in WhatsApp doesn't mean I like WhatsApp again, but I for sure will have more pleasure using WhatsApp. As so many of us, even when you do not want to use WhatsApp, I am forced to use it due to the fact most people I communicate with are on WhatsApp and I was not able to bring them over to Telegram.
Just Don't Be Stupid!
How annoying is it when sending a message and when re-reading it, you discover errors in it and you can not do anything anymore?!
Yep, you can say: Know what you send! Re-read before sending!
But that is easier said then done. Due to the fast pace we are going through life, and the ever increasing number of chat messages we receive to which we are more or less obliged to quickly and immediately respond to, we - for sure I - tend to type and send our chat messages very quick. When this is to friends or family, errors are allowed, but now when sending something to some professional contact, we do not want these errors and therefor we want to be able to correct them.
And don't you send chat messages to the wrong person? When a notification from different users coming in on your smartphone, it is so easy to click the last notification and respond to it and then you find out your response is actually send as a response to another chat. A work around would be not to click any of the notification messages, and I try not to do so, but now and again I see myself making that error with the unwanted result.