There was a story on the radio the other day. Unfortunately, though I’ve tried, I can’t find a link to the podcast version or even a print article about the story. That may be weirdly appropriate though…
The story was about how a growing number of people are setting up their Twitter accounts so that their tweets will automatically expire after a set length of time. The idea is that if Twitter is meant to be a conversation, archiving your tweets forever is contrary to that. Conversations are meant to be temporary, ephemeral. Another argument is that making your tweets temporary is one (of many) things we can do to control our digital lives.
The story really made me think about my digital footprint, and taking control of it, as well as about how I use social media and whether or not I want every conversation I have on Twitter to be around forever. I don’t have any answers yet, but I have decided to try an experiment. I’m going to begin using a program that will automatically delete the tweets from my Cori Vidae twitter account after a set period of time (there are several, I’ll be using one called efemr which uses hashtags to set an expiry date).
After a few months I’ll check back in 🙂
What do you think? Would you ever consider making your tweets expire, or do you like knowing that they’ll be around forever? How do you feel about following someone whose tweets are temporary? Does it matter to you at all?
