Think about every status you’ve posted on a social network. Now take a moment to remember that all those posts are still there, unless you’ve manually deleted them. With a couple of years of accumulated activity, that task can become a nightmare, but the Xpire app offers an automatic alternative that adds expiration dates to each of your messages.
More than a year has passed since I left Twitter, and honestly I don’t miss it. I’ve also gone through some rough moments on Facebook, but its communication tools are still more important than any temporary tantrum. Social networks want you to publish content, much content, which helps keep their gears moving. Now, nothing prevents you from deleting it, as long as you’re willing to face the challenge of purging each message by hand, and acknowledging the possibility that a dark copy remains on remote servers. Social networks have largely resisted any tool that allows you to manage and/or delete messages automatically, but the recent Xpire seems to be working quite well.
In essence, the idea of Xpire is to add an expiration date to each of the messages you publish. From a couple of minutes up to a whole year, entries can remain on the social network as long as you wish. This is useful for many reasons, but I’ll name three:
- First, not all messages are relevant enough to stay stuck to your wall forever.
- Second, stricter control over them can avoid problems in the future (for example, if a potential employer decides to check your Facebook profile).
- Third, there’s the matter of security. Publishing something as innocent as “I went on vacation” when the rest of your profile reveals you live alone means you’ve just shouted to the world that nobody will be at your house, and if that message stays there for several days, it’s extra time reference you probably shouldn’t share.
Xpire Features on Twitter and More
Xpire’s functions are more elaborate in the case of Twitter. You can perform a general assessment of your profile and establish how risky the existing information is, or delete all tweets in a single move, unless there are more than 3,200. The Android version of Xpire only supports Twitter, but support will soon be extended, since the iOS-compatible build supports Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. In both cases, the app is free.
