Everyone might have the option to put their Facebook posts on a timer in the near future.
Facebook is testing a feature exclusively on Facebook’s iOS app which allows users to schedule posts that delete after a chosen amount of time. The current options allow users to delete after one hour, three hours, six hours, 12 hours, one day, two days, or seven days.
“We’re running a small pilot of a feature on Facebook for iOS that lets people schedule deletion of their posts in advance,” said a company representative in an email to PCMag.com.
The feature is not a new approach to social media. Snapchat allows users to send photos, videos, text, and drawings to list of people. “Snaps” have time limits that range from 1 to 10 seconds. Once time is up, the media is unable to be seen again by the recipient, and the media is deleted from Snapchat’s servers.
While Facebook is conducting this test and allowing for deletion after a chosen period of time, other policies have not changed since this experimentation began, which means the post remain on Facebook’s offline backups and logs for up to 90 days.
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg made a failed $3 billion bid for Snapchat in November 2013. Ever since then, Zuckerberg has tried several things with Facebook to emulate the success of Snapchat, such as the Snapchat-like app called Slingshot.
Self-deleting posts might become a hit for those who are too lazy to manually delete posts themselves. But it's also hard to tell what type of posts people would want to self-destruct. Perhaps Facebook is trying to turn the site into a more ephemeral space, where people can quickly post statuses without worrying that their whole wall will be flooded with just their own status updates. It seems like this experiment is trying to roll Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook all in one.
