Weren't they going to roll this out for Messenger at some point? They did it for Zuckerberg, and then mentioned that they were just "testing" it and were going to roll it out generally some time in the future.
You can't unsend an email or text because generally speaking you can't control the other end. SMS was never built with the ability to "recall" a text, so once it's been delivered, it's off the carrier's hands. Email is similar, although with modern mail clients (outside of POP3), you would be able to remotely delete emails in most cases. Exchange recall works exactly like this; if the e-mail hasn't been read yet, then there's a chance for the recall to happen silently. Otherwise, you get a separate "X would like to recall" message instead.
With Facebook Messenger, you're entirely within their platform. You read messages on the Facebook site, or Messenger, and they control it fully. It'd very much be possible to add this functionality.
Have you asked people if they want it? Any time I make a mistake I think about the ability to unsend or edit what was already sent (within a time limit etc etc).
Generally speaking, people aren't going to think, let alone talk to others about a feature that doesn't exist in most platforms they use.
But clearly people do want the ability since Exchange provides that feature, and GMail will delay sending your message for up to minutes in case you want to "Undo" the send.
The gmail case isn't an "unsend" feature, it's just a delayed send.
OP seems to be suggesting you can take back a message once it's sent. This opens up issues since the receiver may have already read the message. Now you get into cases where someone says "Bill threatened me over Facebook messenger" but now Bill has deleted that message.
going by comments I have read here and in reddit, yes I think most people want to be able to delete things they said or posted on fb when they were teenagers
I think deleting posts is different then deleting messages. If I'm having a conversation with you, and make some threat but then delete it. Does it stay in your thread? Get deleted from both threads? What if you screen shot it? If I delete a post, it no longer lives in either feed.
