Delete it Later – Schedule Your Tweets and Facebook Status To Be Deleted Later

http://www.deleteitlater.com/

by djug • 12 years ago

46 46 12 years ago

deleteitlater.com

djug3• 12 years ago

Delete it Later: Where Facebook and Twitter Meet Snapchat

eyeareque2• 12 years ago

Except that I highly doubt facebook and twitter delete all copies of the data.

baddox• 12 years ago

Do you think Snapchat does?

atwebb• 12 years ago

Edit the comment once or twice then delete it? They may keep full history though, who knows.

01walid• 12 years ago

Simple idea, nice hack, I think some people will find this very useful!

bhartzer• 12 years ago

Great idea, I guess it could be useful for some people. Frankly, I probably wouldn't use it though, since I never really post anything that I think I'll regret later. And when I do, though, I end up manually deleting it.

Glyptodon• 12 years ago

What I'm afraid of is that something that seems totally innocuous now ends up being something that is 'bad' later... What's that? You shared a link to x? You must be a communist 2.0 McCarthyism.

silveira• 12 years ago

Post it Later would be what I'm looking for.

batuhanicoz• 12 years ago

Have you looked into [Buffer](https://bufferapp.com/)?

djug3• 12 years ago

Deleteitlater would be the Anti-Buffer :)

eli• 12 years ago

I think pretty much all "social media management" platforms do that. HootSuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck, etc.

DotSauce• 12 years ago

Good for a marketing gimmick? Limited time offer: This tweet will self-destruct in 24 hours.

deserted• 12 years ago

What do you get for $3/month? The Premium page is very unclear.

djug3• 12 years ago

it's the unlimited plan (I'll update that page)

with the free plan you can schedule up to 5 tweets and 5 facebook status at a time

reuwsaat• 12 years ago

Facebook is free! (So long as you're comfortable being the product.) I know, I'll create a new account with another service and then pay them to delete my history. Never mind that now yet another company, this time one without an obvious privacy policy, potentially has access to my personal info.

smokinjoe2• 12 years ago

What are the use-cases for something like this?

I'm really curious because for me personally, if I were to delete something later then my opinion is that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place. Of course typos and mistakes happen but I feel like those things can't really be scheduled.

I guess maybe having it permanently turning on during evening hours to prevent any lasting drunk tweets/posts - but it's the internet, once it's up there and embarrassing it's probably everywhere else too.

md2242• 12 years ago

As someone who was just thinking about this concept a week or two ago, I can tell you how I viewed the use case. (And kudos to the developer who actually followed through with building it, unlike me!)

To me, it's about subverting the chilling effect that occurs when you're about to say something online and you think "could someone potentially use these words against me?" Not only governments or enemies with grudges, but even future employers with hair-trigger sensitivity doing some kind of background review. Many of us (if not all of us) have opinions or perspectives that may make others uncomfortable, and it seems unfortunate when we censor ourselves for the sake of maintaining a pristine public image.

One solution is to simply say whatever you want and then, if you reach a point where you sense that your persona may come under scrutiny (perhaps you're applying for jobs), go back and remove any material that you feel might be used against you.

The other solution is this concept of self-deleting messages. Instead of having to go back and find all the things you said that could be liabilities, simply give these comments a maximum lifetime when you make them. It's an efficiency thing. You save yourself the worry of "ah god what if I forget I said this and someone finds it down the road" and you avoid neurosis keeping you silent when you should be able to speak your mind. It seems like a win-win to me.

Sure, if somebody REALLY wanted to preserve your statements on the internet, they could do that. And this tool would basically be useless for celebrities or anyone with a significant following. But most of us aren't those people. Our public faces rarely come under scrutiny, but it would be helpful to have a tool that makes it easier to manage when they do.

zeroc• 12 years ago

Yeah, absolutely my thoughts. Many times I want to post something related to politics and as you know we all have some weird opinions, then a couple of days after that the post becomes obsolete.

adyus• 12 years ago

I think your comment is assuming that something actually gets deleted permanently from social networks. That has been proven to not be the case.

Once something is published, the cat's out of the bag. Sure, for a person with few followers trying to guard their future, the risk is smaller than the celebrity in your example.

But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.

jamesbritt• 12 years ago

I'm really curious because for me personally, if I were to delete something later then my opinion is that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place.

Twitter, for me, has the feel of an impromptu off-the-cuff conversation with some odd, semi-random, group of people.

It encourages the offhand remark, things that make sense and have value (hopefully) at a given time. When tweeted, a comment is valuable to the owner and the readers, but as time passes and the context is lost the value and meaning changes.

I like the idea of enforcing a public ephemerality on things that are created within a specific time and context.

smokinjoe2• 12 years ago

I like the idea of enforcing a public ephemerality on things that are created within a specific time and context.

That makes a lot of sense. I could absolutely see the usefulness of an option to delete tweets that have taken place in a conversation where previous tweets had been deleted.

Sure it could be abused, but it wouldn't leave any out-of-context updates out there.

slg• 12 years ago

A lot of tweets have no value without context and many times that context can simply be timing. This is especially true during live events like the Superbowl or Oscars. Those tweets might have immense immediate value, but they lose almost all value once that live event has passed. If you want a perfectly currated feed that allows users to go back and read your tweet history (or you expect someone might do that as part of a hiring decision) I could certainly see value in clearing out those tweets that are now worthless without their original context.

klapinat0r• 12 years ago

I follow your point, but isn't that the duality of what hashtags try to solve (topic and context)?

zorpner• 12 years ago

This is an interesting article from a couple years ago about some people who either disable their social media accounts when not in use, or use them ephemerally: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/11/08/risk-re...

yummyfajitas• 12 years ago

Sometimes the context of a tweet can be forgotten.

Mel Gibson, 4 years ago: "You Look Like A F---Cking Pig In Heat And If You Get Raped By A Pack Of N---Ers It Will Be your fault"

http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-offensive-mel-gibson-...

A tweet from 4 years ago: "In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."

Years later the conclusion of the media frenzy was that Pax Dickonson was a great big racist, because no one recognized that he was mocking Mel Gibson.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Facebook will ban this almost immediately.

amitgupta42• 12 years ago

Seriously, what is the use-case of this product ?

dorkrawk• 12 years ago

I was thinking about a product like this marketed at new parents. A lot of people like to post pictures of their kids but I can imagine situations where removing these pictures some time in the future would be really beneficial.

Imagine you post a bunch cute pictures of little Jonny as a toddler. Maybe when little Jonny is in high school he doesn't want classmates to be able to find every "cute" picture of him that his mom wanted to share with her friends and family. Obviously once those pictures are "out there" they're potentially out there, but something like this could help, especially for situations years later.

hayksaakian• 12 years ago

Maybe in the future having your baby photos online will be normal?

Much like people use their real name online as opposed to 10+years ago

fixedd• 12 years ago

I can remember (mid-90s) when we thought it was downright scandalous that one of our friends had on his website something to the effect of "About: My name is John Doe and I live at 123 Sesame St. Anytown, AL 00000. If you'd like to send me a letter, I'll respond. If you'd like to stalk me... that information was already available to you."

blyes• 12 years ago

It's a good concept, but posting using a third-party website is an inconvenience.

A simpler way of doing could be for the user to just add hashtags to their statuses (e.g. #12h or #7d), and have the service read and delete statuses accordingly.

mtpearce• 12 years ago

I wrote this app. http://www.hashtag-e.com #e15m

GrinningFool• 12 years ago

Knowing that nothing is ever verifiably and completely deleted... I'm not sure I see what need this fills.

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

In general, security is never perfect, so imagining the perfect binary "secure or insecure" isn't useful.

Instead, think about it in levels. Is something secure from a casual observer? Is it secure from your teenager who can devote a lot of time to it? What about a professional who devotes a lot of time to it? What about a court order? What about a concerted effort from the government to build an ASIC farm to crack your encryption?

You could look at this in the same way. Is your tweet visible to a casual observer? Is it available to a dedicated searcher? Is it available to a technically competent outside searcher? Is it available to police without a warrant? Is it available to someone with superadmin on the database inside Twitter?

When you think about it that way, the general utility of the service should be obvious.

shelf• 12 years ago

I'd like something that deletes everything I post to those services after, say, 90 days. Allow an exception for photos.

brianbarker2• 12 years ago

http://www.tweetdelete.net/

Ryel• 12 years ago

I would actually really like something like this.

I can't imagine how mad the big guys (Facebook, Twitter, etc) would be if this service grew big

gretchen_204• 12 years ago

Amazing feature. Just what I needed.

brianbarker2• 12 years ago

Google "tweet delete all" and see how many web sites already do this. This isn't a naysayer post about your work, but rather a curious observation that maybe these services aren't that well known (or used?). IDK, maybe that gives you a space to take over.

junto• 12 years ago

I think the use of the word 'delete' should not be taken literally. I believe that Facebook for example simply archives your content for posterity (and the NSA) and then marks your photo record as 'hidden'. It then removes the actual photo from the CDN.

Well, that's what I would do if I was in the business of classifying every person on the planet for advertising purposes and security/population control.

bigbugbag• 12 years ago

/sarcasm Wow! what a deal! give away your login and password to a third party which will tell facebook to hide your user provided content from others users after a while. Until facebook makes this third party forbidden and shuts it down. /sarcasm off

it's not the facebook users you should mind but facebook itself, though facebook users are scary for using facebook and giving away all their data in the first place. Facebook is not deleting anything anyway, and will continue to sell your data long after you "blanked" your profile and all its content.

ichaib• 12 years ago

Nice idea and very neat execution. I like the self-destruct aspect which would help be get excited if you offer them something(think couponing..etc). Personnally I can see myself using it when tweating something very particular and contextual (i.e. agenda of a conference which updates automatically when we progress during the day)

Delete it Later – Schedule Your Tweets and Facebook Status To Be Deleted Later

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