Texting has become one of our main forms of communication today. And while it is extremely convenient to have all your conversations and correspondances at your disposal at any given moment, it invites procrastination.
When we're talking to someone, face to face, it's an unspoken rule that, when we ask something, we immediately get a response. Both parties understand each other, because there is little room for misinterpretation and miscommunication. That way a conversation will (mostly) find a satisfactory conclusion to both parties.
But instant messaging changed that. When we send someone a message, they rarely answer immediately. Fair enough - people have other things to do beside staring at their phone. So, when they don't answer right away, we just think "they're probably out doing something".
We use that "plausible deniability" to our advantage, thinking "I'll answer later, it'll be fine". We procrastinate because there isn't the same social pressure to answer instantly as there is in an actual face-to-face conversation.
This behaviour results in gaps in our instant messaging conversations. And those gaps ultimately limit the understanding of the other person and invite misinterpretation and sometimes even speculation.
BOOM Messenger aims to combat miscommunication in text messaging by combatting the gaps in time between message and response.
By attaching a self-destruct timer to the message the person we're conversing with is motivated to answer before the timer runs out. The timer activates once they've seen the message in the chat window and when it runs out unanswered, the message self-destructs, never to be seen again.
