Line messaging app adding unsend function to save us from our embarrassing selves

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After beginning service in Japan in 2011, Naver Corporation’s Line messaging app quickly become one of the most popular ways to stay connected to personal acquaintances. A big part of the appeal is that thanks to its streamlined, optimized-for-smartphones interface, Line is quicker and easier to use than email for written communication on the go.

But sometimes the speed and simplicity of Line can cause problems of their own. It’s so effortless to compose and fire off a message that just about everyone has completed the process in seconds, only to notice it was sent to the wrong person. Even when you’ve selected the right recipient, the way Line allows for almost stream of consciousness-style correspondence makes it all too easy to send a hasty, overly harsh message at someone you’ve been arguing with, or to send a message that you thought was incredibly clever while you were five beers into the night, but which seems decidedly less so once you’ve sobered up a bit.

From next month, though, Line is throwing users a bone and giving you a chance to erase your mistakes, as a new “unsend” function is being added to the app which will let you delete sent messages. There is one catch, though, in that the function can only be used for messages that are less than 24 hours old. Once a full day passes, your message is in the system forever.

On the bright side, the speedy nature of online communication means that odds are if 24 hours have passed, the person you sent the message to has already seen it, and you’re past the point where deleting the message would make any difference. But at least the unsend function will allow you to avoid the embarrassment of accidentally sending a booty call to your mom, or the fallout from a remark that you immediately realize cuts a little deeper than you want it to.

Somewhat counterintuitively, Line is celebrating the addition of its unsend function with what it’s calling its “Black Friday” event, which actually has no connection to the American shopping event that takes place on the day after Thanksgiving. Instead, Line’s Black Friday is a campaign running from Nov 16 to 24 in which it’s encouraging users to send messages with the hashtag #LINE誤爆 (“Line messages sent to the wrong person”), sharing their tales of when they screwed up and sent a message through the app to someone other than who they intended to.

The best stories will earn their users Line points, gifts codes, and other prizes. On the other hand, if you simply decide to lie low and limit your Line messages to the absolute minimum until the unsend function gets added in December, we can’t say we blame you.

Related: Line Black Friday