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Send self-destructing social media posts with Xpire

This free iPhone app lets you schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr that will self destruct after a time period of your choosing.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
2 min read

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Matt Elliott/CNET

Confession time: I am terrible at Twitter. I apologize to anyone who has attempted to contact me via a tweet. I'm slightly less terrible at Facebook, where I do check in regularly and post occasionally. With Twitter, however, I feel like I always arrive in the middle of a conversation and rarely summon the effort required to comb through the onslaught on information in order to locate the few tweets that have meaning to me. I know, I could adjust those whom I follow to create a better feed, but instead I have basically decided to opt out of Twitter.

Perhaps if more people on Twitter used Xpire, I'd come around more. Xpire is a free iPhone app that lets you schedule self-destructing tweets as well as Facebook and Tumblr posts. After all, a tweet along the lines of "I'm at the mall, what's poppin'?" does not need to live on for future generations. Or even the next day.

After launching Xpire for the first time and connecting it to your social media profiles, tap the speech bubble button in the upper-right corner to open the compose window. When writing a post, you'll see a character counter for tweets, a button to attach a photo, and a Friends button to select your Facebook audience.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

With your post composed, tap the Next button to select how long until Xpire removes the post. You can schedule a post to stick around for one minute or up to one year, and there is also an option to have it last forever, should you get in the habit of using Xpire for both temporary and permanent posts. After selecting an expiration date, tap the Next button again and select which of your social media accounts to send it to.

Xpire offers a few other features for Twitter accounts. It will rate your Twitter profile, giving you a letter grade for the amount of potentially risky content you share on Twitter. There is also a button to delete all of your tweets, but if I'm reading it right, it'll delete only your 3,200 most recent tweets because that's the limit to what the app can crawl through. You can also view the tweets you have set to expire to see how much time is remaining on each and adjust the timing as necessary.

Via Lifehacker.