Facebook tests Snapchat-like expiration dates for your posts

Facebook tests Snapchat-like expiration dates for your posts ,

Facebook has begun testing a new feature for its iPhone app that lets users set new posts for deletion after a certain interval of time — anything from one hour to seven days. The Next Web spotted several users on Twitter who posted screenshots of the feature.

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Facebook told The Next Web that the feature was a "pilot" and only available to some users, like many of the experiments it runs. The company also erected a brief Help page called "How do I post something and set it to expire?" which says that the feature is only available in some areas. If the test is considered to be successful, Facebook will likely roll out the feature more broadly, though probably not as a default setting. Facebook has its Timeline profiles to think of, after all, which holds everything from life events to family photos that you don't want to disappear.

Can Facebook reconcile its open sharing philosophy with ephemerality?

Expired posts will disappear from your profile, but may remain on Facebook servers for up to 90 days before they're completely purged. Facebook is thinking long and hard about what it wants to be, and which features it will be forced to steal from competitors in order to remain useful. Most Facebook users have likely never seen or heard of Snapchat, but the appeal of self-destructing messages is easy to understand: sometimes you want to post a photo but you don't want it to stick around for 20 years.

With that said, I'm not sure that Facebook can easily reconcile it's one-size-fits-all posting with ephemerality. How often is there something you want to share with all of the people you know, but that you'd also want to go away in a week? I don't think there's much overlap there. Facebook does offer tools for sharing with smaller groups of people, however. Disappearing messages could perhaps find a home on Facebook when used in coordination with this feature. At that point, a disappearing post shared with 10 people is in fact not so different from most snaps we send. However, Snapchat's mechanism for sending a photo to ten friends is still far faster.

Facebook's tests are only the company's latest flirtation with ephemerality. In June the company launched Slingshot, a standalone app that in many ways mirrored the functionality of Snapchat. The app hasn't caught on, perhaps in part due to its unique pay-to-play mechanic that asks you to send a photo before you can open the one you just received. Facebook recently made this requirement optional, thought at this point Slingshot is quite likely as good as dead.