Ever sent a text message you wish you could take back? Well now you can, thanks to Tigertext. Tiger Woods probably wishes he had this smart phone application; it would have certainly lessened some of the evidence that helped secure his scandal in the mind of the public.

While ironically named, Tigertext was not named after Tiger Woods. The developers at least claim they came up with the name prior to the Tiger Woods scandal.

On to the application itself, Tigertext can be purchased in the iTunes application store for free. Using the application is not free; one has to purchase an unlimited texting plan from the developers. They base these plans on monthly or yearly charges. Unlimited texts for a month will cost users $1.99, and unlimited texts for a year are $19.99. You can purchase these plans through the Apple app store. While it costs to send texts using the program, receiving them is free.

Tigertext works differently from how phones normally send texts. Instead of the texts being saved in multiple places, it is all stored on the Tigertext server; where after a certain amount of time the texts are auto-deleted. That isn’t what makes Tigertext so great, what does make it great is the text lifespan. This gives users the option to set a time period for the text to be read before it deletes itself. It also allows for senders to go back in and delete the message hopefully before the other party reads it.

One really unique feature of the text lifespan system Tigertext uses is delete-on-reading. This makes the text delete itself a minute after the text is opened. This means after one minute there is no trace of the sent message. That being said, if someone really wanted to record the message they got, they could take a screen shot on their smart phones, or just take a normal picture of it.

While a neat tool to catch those texts that seemed like a good idea to send at the time, Tigertext in no way assures you complete safety from such mistakes. So, in the long run, the safer bet may be to show a bit of self- control and not send out those potentially damning messages. This is perhaps something a certain golf star is now learning.

Cover and story photo from Creative Commons

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.