Paranoid people don’t like to be tracked or have their online activity logged, so using social networks is out of the question for them. Or is it?

Thanks to former Twitter engineer, Pierre Legrain, it’s now possible to give your tweets an expiry date, with a simple hashtag. His tool is called Twitterspirit (presumably it has something to do with the ghosts of your tweets once they’re killed), and it lets users post using hashtags that will delete their messages after a predetermined amount of time. For example, tweeting with #15m will have that post deleted fifteen minutes later. Similarly, using #14d will keep it alive for 14 days.

It’s simple to use, and all that’s needed is for a user to log into Twitterspirit and authorise it to access and delete tweets. But the way we see it, anybody who wants a tweet deleted is giving the game away by tagging it with one of the above-mentioned hashtags. Say something incriminating and add #1m? You can bet somebody’s going to take a screenshot and not let you live it down.

For others, though, there could be an alternative use. Many celebrities and Twitter users like to keep their timelines clean, and free of interaction. One example would be New Zealand-based Twitter funnyman, Mark Leggett. In a blog post he details why he doesn’t reply to people on Twitter, but stops short of committing to delete replies. Meanwhile, actual comedian Rob Delaney religiously removes all correspondence from his timeline.

For them, and others, Twitterspirit could become a useful tool. For others, it could just be a pointless exercise in nullifying the social component of the service.

Source: TechCrunch