
Delete it Later – Schedule Your Tweets and Facebook Status To Be Deleted Later - djug
http://www.deleteitlater.com/
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smokinjoe
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.

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md224
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.

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adyus
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.

~~~
md224
> 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.

Sure, that's valid. I guess I just don't see that risk as worth worrying
about; I can't envision a scenario in which a future auditor (other than the
government, perhaps) would resort to that kind of digital archeology to defeat
my attempts at removing controversial statements.

It's possible that I'm just really underestimating how much the average person
has their social media statements cached and replicated across the Internet in
a public fashion, accessible by a simple search for their name. In my opinion,
if you say something and then have a program "delete" it after 48 hours,
future employers or adversaries aren't going to see it unless:

a) they happen to work for the social network in question and see no problem
in digging through their own databases/backups

b) they're a government agency with access to troves of archived
communications

Considering I find both scenarios to be fairly unethical, I don't think I'd
want to seek employment from company A or government agency B to begin with.

Of course, when we're talking about governments as adversaries, the rules go
out the window. I'm talking more about barely controversial statements made by
average citizens who might be a little concerned with how future employers
view their public persona. I think that's a valid use case.

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reuwsaat
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.

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

~~~
brianbarker
[http://www.tweetdelete.net/](http://www.tweetdelete.net/)

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djug
Delete it Later: Where Facebook and Twitter Meet Snapchat

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

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

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eyeareque
Storage is nearly free today; so much like the NSA I'm sure facebook captures
and stores everything. Plus it is text; if they had a space problem they could
just compress it and store it to huge tapes if disks were too expensive to do
that (probably not an issue for FB).

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dorkrawk
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.

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hayksaakian
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

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fixedd
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."

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blyes
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.

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mtpearce
I wrote this app. [http://www.hashtag-e.com](http://www.hashtag-e.com) #e15m

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bigbugbag
/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.

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junto
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.

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ichaib
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)

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

~~~
droopyEyelids
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.

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brianbarker
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.

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bhartzer
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
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.

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

~~~
djug
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

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Ryel
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

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

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01walid
Simple idea, nice hack, I think some people will find this very useful!

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

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

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djug
Deleteitlater would be the Anti-Buffer :)

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svmegatron
You could use DeleteItLater to prevent Buffer Overflow.

Sorry, I'll show myself out.

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higherpurpose
Facebook will ban this almost immediately.

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gretchen_204
Amazing feature. Just what I needed.

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amitgupta42
Seriously, what is the use-case of this product ?

