I’ve been so buy at work I haven’t had time to post about a great little app I found while going through the monthly reading pile.
The winter 2010/2011 issue of CSQ had a interview with TigerText CEO Jeffrey Evans. TigerText is an ingenious little app that Evans says is “a texting service that allows senders to have absolute control over their messages.”
“The sender chooses a lifespan for their messages from one minute to 30 days. Once that lifespan is expired, the message deleted from your phone, the recipients phone, and all servers in-between. The messages cannot be copied or forwarded. You have control over the communication that you send. When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Oh hell yes. Where do I sign up?
TigerText is free for Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows 7. All you do is download the app from your phone’s app store, setup a user name, and you’re done!
TigerText can scan your existing contacts and automatically add those who already have TigerText installed on their phone (based on matching emails and phone numbers I’m guessing). I chose not to do that and am using the individual direct-invitation option (which I think is a little more secure).
There’s a very thorough walkthrough the first time you launch the app that shows you how to set your messages to delete. You can set each message individually so sections of conversations will delete at different times.
After the scheduled time is up, you will be left with nothing but tiger tracks on screen where the conversation used to be.
Evans says there’s nothing he can do about someone taking a screenshot of the conversation in progress, a video/photo of the phone as you’re typing, or anything out of the app’s control like that. But he does say the TigerText servers don’t keep any information, and when the conversation is deleted, it really is deleted everywhere.
I like it. It’s easy enough to use daily and adds another layer of privacy to SMS and text conversations.
Check it out at TigerText’s website.
