Think Before You Hit Send: D.C. Entrepreneur Helps You Avoid Text Regret

Think Before You Hit Send: D.C. Entrepreneur Helps You Avoid Text Regret

Think Before You Hit Send: D.C. Entrepreneur Helps You Avoid Text Regret

Posted Mar 20, 2015

How many times has the following happened to you?

You type a text on your smartphone. You hit “Send.” And then you immediately wish you hadn’t.

Every day, Americans send more than 6 billion texts. So it’s no wonder incidents of “Text Regret” are on the rise.

Take what happened to Shuo Song. He’s a pediatrician in Washington, D.C., and a little while back he had to visit Chicago for one night for work. He had plans to meet up with a friend there. Thing is, though, he was exhausted when he got to town, so he canceled. But then, he took himself out for ramen.

“And then the next day she texted me and she said, ‘Oh, hey, how was your night?’” Shuo recounts. “And without even thinking, I said, ‘Hey, it was great! I had a great bowl of ramen at this restaurant!’ And that was definitely a text that I would like back.”

Liz Odar knows that feeling well. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, and as we in the D.C. region know so well, the winter has been particularly brutal. So when her mom texted from Florida, with a photo of seagulls flocking on a sunny, sandy beach, Liz kind of snapped.

“I walked to my front door, and I flipped off the snow and the cold air and I took a picture of it,” Liz explains.

She texted her mom the picture… along with the words, “Here’s a bird of my own.”

“Almost immediately after I hit Send, I thought, ‘Oh no. Is my mom going to think that I’m flipping her off?’” Liz recalls. “No no no no no no no!”

As D.C. resident Maci Peterson puts it: “We’re moving so quickly, we’re multitasking, that we don’t necessarily give things that second thought of, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t say that!’”

At the ripe age of 28, Maci is CEO and co-founder of On Second Thought. Download this new app to your phone, hit “Send” on a text, and you’ll have up to 60 seconds to decide if you really want it to leave your phone.

“My grace period is 7 seconds,” she says. “Which means that after hitting Send, I have 7 seconds to swipe left to get my message back.”

Peterson was motivated to create On Second Thought after experiencing her own text regret. A few years back, for one reason or another, she’d been missing calls from her ex-boyfriend.

“So I wanted to text him: ‘Hey, for some reason I keep missing your calls,’” she explains. “But Auto-correct changed it to ‘Hey, for reason I keep missing’ that part of the male anatomy that rhymes with ‘calls’!”

On Second Thought differs from apps like Tiger Text or Strings because they only let you erase a message after it goes out. Strings’ creators claim once you delete a text, it’s truly gone, not stored on a cloud-server somewhere.

But if you ask Allison Druin what she thinks about using one of these apps, she says “it is a crutch.”

Druin is the Chief Futurist at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. You may also know her as the “Computer Gal” on The Kojo Nnamdi Show’s “Tech Tuesday.” Druin’s worry is we’ll become too reliant on apps like On Second Thought.

“Instead of stopping people from doing the wrong thing, how can we help people learn to communicate in more appropriate ways?” she asks.

One way is by thinking more carefully about what we put out there and how quickly we do it.

“We have tools that let us instantly send things, tell things that we never could in the past,” she says. “So as I get older, I don’t get wiser; I get more cautious.”

That means resisting the urge to over-share, something to which she believes more and more of us are falling victim.

“It’s just like being a kid and knowing that I drew this, but it’s really not real until I put it on the refrigerator,” she says. “And when mom puts it on the refrigerator, it’s real.”

Shuo Song — our ramen-loving, text-regretting pediatrician — also thinks over-sharing is far too abundant in our society. So he says, sure, an app like On Second Thought could be helpful, “But I think a better exercise might be to force yourself to think twice before hitting Send. Having those moments where you are confronted with something that you don’t feel proud of, can be healthy in small doses.”

And he should know. After texting his friend that comment about the ramen, he spent the next handful of texts… apologizing.

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