The Dish

Chris Albon longs for an online experience with less permanence:

The Web is quickly coming to the point that everything you say or do online can be used against you in the court of public opinion. Some say we could be looking at the end of forgetting, where the past can be accessed with the click of a mouse. Over the years, people have adapted, becoming for vigilant about what they post or have posted about them online. We have become increasingly experienced at online self-censorship. But we shouldn’t need to. …

We deserve an ephemeral Web; one with communications unburdened by permanence. We deserve to have the Web—at least some of the time—forgive and forget. Hopefully, applications like Snapchat are just the beginning of that ephemeral Web. With luck, in time there will be a whole class of applications from email applications to microblogging platforms whose killer app is that they capture nothing, remember nothing.

Felix Gillette covers Snapchat, the app that deletes a photo seconds after the receiver views it:

[Viktor] Mayer-Schönberger [author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age] argues that all information created online should come with customizable expiration dates. Not every piece of data would have to expire after a few seconds as photos on Snapchat do. The key, says Mayer-Schönberger, is to include some form of a self-destruct button in everything created online and to give consumers the power to tinker with the settings from the outset.

Michael Scherer expects to see more tools like this emerge:

Technology has created an enormous burden on all of us. Over time, more companies will move into this space, selling not just a way for us to connect to each other–a technology that long ago left novelty and became a commodity–but a way for us better protect our connections by eliminating their trail. (Facebook already has a Snapchat mimic, called Poke.) There is no good reason that emails you wrote three years ago should be so hard to delete, or still be living on the servers of your friends’ email clients.

Previous Dish on Snapchat here. It sure would have saved me some acute embarrassment a decade and a bit ago.

The social networking giant just released its own version of Snapchat, called Poke, which allows users to send photos or videos that quickly self-delete. Amanda Hess favors the original:

This is Snapchat’s cultural triumph over Facebook: It is a social network where sex is comfortably integrated into a user's wider digital life. On Snapchat, sexual identity isn’t cemented through a series of boxes and menus. User profiles are nearly nonexistent, and even private messages are fleeting (though the app has some loopholes yet to close). That’s a winning formula for teenagers, who are highly invested in exploring their sexualities, but face strong cultural shaming from both peers and adults for doing so. Snapchat allows users to behave sexually without that behavior defining them—not for more than a few seconds, anyway.

While acknowledging its myriad flaws, Mark Wilson offers a defense of Facebook's new app:

[F]or whatever Poke may lack in polish, it makes up for in acknowledging the failures of social networking–namely, that social networks lack one of the most important parts of socializing: The safe spontaneity that stems from the forgetfulness of the human mind. 

The Internet is designed to remember everything, to perfectly catalog and update every piece of information you could possibly need at any moment. And while that’s great for researching penguin migrational patterns and getting the best deal on Bounty Select-a-Size, it’s agonizing for socialization. How long do you spend composing a quip on Twitter? 30 seconds? A minute? Several minutes? How long do you spend composing a quip in person? A split second? Why is there such a difference?

One major problem with Poke compared to Snapchat is Facebook's vast social network: "Because if there’s anything on the Internet that’s the anti-sext, it’s probably the place where your conservative extended family is hanging out." But such self-deleting services aren't only being used to flirt with people; Todd Wasserman previews how the frozen yogurt chain 16Handles is using Snapchat:

If you snap a pic of you or your friends at a 16Handles location tasting one of their flavors, you can send it to Love16Handles on Snapchat. In return, you'll get a coupon for anywhere from 16% to 100% off on your purchase. You have 10 seconds to let the cashier scan the coupon, though.

Kevin Roose is puzzled by the Instagram backlash:

Instagram is a business, not a public utility. You were given access to it for free, and it currently has the financial weight of Facebook behind it, but Instagram needs to make money at some point, or else it will cease to exist. Think of it like a 30-day software trial period. Eventually, that period has to end. And when it does, it only has a few options for charging you, one of which is direct (making you pay $5 or $10 a month to belong), and the other of which is indirect (keeping it free for members but making advertisers pay for licensing). You may not like that Instagram is choosing option B over option A, but realize that it had to choose one or the other at some point.

Nilay Patel explains exactly what Instagram can and can't do with your photos:

The company can't sell your photos, and it can't take your photos and change them in any meaningful way. So what can Instagram do? Well, an advertiser can pay Instagram to display your photos in a way that doesn't create anything new — so Budweiser can put up a box in the timeline that says "our favorite Instagram photos of this bar!" and put user photos in there, but it can't take those photos and modify them, or combine them with other content to create a new thing. Putting a logo on your photo would definitely break the rules. But putting a logo somewhere near your photos? That would probably be okay.

His bottom line:

[T]he real lesson here isn't about the legal implications of Instagram's terms of service — it's about how little we trust Facebook to do the right thing.

Some are less savvy than others:

Sarah Nicole Prickett craves a good sext:

Consider what’s required in a formal sentence: the rhythm of punctuation, of course, but also knowing when to start, when to stop. Consider too the devastating effects of a well-timed ellipsis; read some Bataille. Erotic grammar is good grammar. Sexting has sped up seduction, but if you write it right, it can still torture.

I have a long-distance lover now and our text exchanges are fragmentary and agonizing and great. We met in person and had sex in person which helps fill in the ellipses, and I still always want to have sex in person, especially because we can’t. But wanting is sometimes as close to ecstasy as having.

I always think about the first time we were in some incalescent argument on g-chat and he finally said, "you’re right," and then (though he had yet to touch me) "for some reason that makes me want to slide my hand under your skirt up your thigh," and then, "I’m going to go eat…" and then, "lunch." And reader, I fucking died.

The iPhone app Snapchat can help with the pictorial part:

Snapchat allows a person to take and send a picture and control how long it is visible by the person who receives it, up to 10 seconds. After that, the picture disappears and can’t be seen again. If the person viewing the picture tries to use an iPhone feature that captures an image of whatever is on the screen, the sender is notified. … But even if a Snapchat image is set to vanish after a few seconds, there’s nothing to stop someone from taking a photograph of his smartphone screen with another camera.