People go on Facebook to express a wide array of sentiments but a lot of the time many people end up regretting what they have posted. The option to delete a post is available but now a new feature is being tested out by the social network as a way of letting users purge posts.
With this new feature, Facebook is looking at giving users the ability to create self-destructing posts. As its name suggests, a self-destructing post is one that will be deleted from the social network after a set period of time. Schedule options range from as early as an hour after posting to a week, but will only be available at the moment on Facebook for iOS.
A self-destructing feature on Facebook will come really handy but it's not exactly revolutionary. In fact, it looks a lot like the social network is copying off Snapchat, the online messaging app that Facebook tried to buy in 2013 for $3 billion.
After Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel publicly declined CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg's offer, Facebook has been aggressively "adopting" features from the messaging app, even after the company acquired WhatsApp, another messaging app.
First there was Slingshot. At the heart of it, Slingshot was just like Snapchat. The only difference the two messaging apps had was that Slingshot pushed users to post more, requiring a photo message be posted before one can be unlocked. Interest waned for Slingshot so Facebook made the send-a-photo-to-unlock-a-photo feature optional, much to the ire of those who are actually using the photo messaging app.
And then there was Bolt. The app is from Instagram but since Facebook owns the company now, it was still technically its decision to develop Bolt. And again, the app was eerily similar to Snapchat.
Even the mobile messaging feature on Facebook was broken off from the main app to give birth to Messenger, a standalone messaging app.
The only feature that Facebook has yet to adopt from Snapchat was the self-destructing capability and that's what it's doing now.
The only difference between how Snapchat and Facebook are implementing self-destructing posts is that the latter treats posts scheduled for deletion as being manually deleted. This means the post and information about it will be removed immediately from the site but it can take up to 90 days before Facebook gets rid of all traces from its servers.
Facebook also recently rolled out a feature that counts how many times a video has been viewed on the social network.
