I’m sure this was one of those ideas I dreamed up ages ago (like this sort of thing) but I’ve searched and can’t find a blog post so maybe I didn’t.

Anyway, I like the principle behind X-pire which intends to add digital expiration dates to photos which means those embarrassing photos will actually fade away from the internet – so decreasing the half-life of such radioactive incidents. I’m sure it could also be subverted so you control your personal profile (like, I know I’m still a really good looking bloke, but I’m sure I looked better 10 years ago so we’ll leave the expiration dates off that one). There’s probably a load of technical challenges to implement this kind of thing, but good luck to them.

I was thinking a while ago that it might be nice for databases to have “data erosion” features. So for instance, locations, addresses, dates and so on “erode” over time and become less specific. It would actually make me feel more comfortable about entering that kind of specific into the current set of location-aware services as – eventually – I wouldn’t need to worry that I’d be exposing too much personal information if the service was hacked (or whatever).

Similarly, the same kind of erosion could occur with loose relationships such as social graphs – friends are only actually friends if you interact with them right? Presumably this is the kind of smarts that services such as Facebook already have, but it would be cool to have simple datatypes that handled this stuff automatically: e.g. “Weighted Relationship” or “Erodable Date/Time”.

You heard it here first. Probably.