In Silicon Valley, the adage works a little different. Over here. its “if you can’t buy ’em, beat ’em”
After its $3 billion bid to buy Snapchat was unceremoniously rejected, Facebook’s been working hard at developing a competing service. It recently launched its own ephemeral messaging app Slingshot, and now it’s testing the self deleting feature on its main platform as well.
Yesterday, The Next Web reported that several Facebook mobile users were seeing a new feature that gave them the option to schedule a time for their posts to automatically delete themselves. Users can select how long they would like this post to be up, in terms of hours, days or weeks. Here’s what it looks like:
New #Facebook feature. Post expiration dates?! Spotted this tonight: pic.twitter.com/Sv98D6qI7I
— Jen Flitter (@jenflitter) September 8, 2014
It’s an interesting addition, but it lacks the entertainment factor of an instant message or an instant picture. So it’s not really clear what the immediate use case is for it. Well not for regular users anyway. There could be scenarios for brands who could post temporary discount codes or offers on their Facebook pages and generate high levels of engagement with the urgency of the messages. But for us non-selling folk, unless you’re really intent on offending people on your Facebook timeline and then being able to plausibly deny it later through a self deleting post, I can’t think of a reason to use the new feature, can you?
