Among my list of annoying, irritating technologies are the long-term memories of technologies I work with. You may not have guessed it, but I have a predilection for nuking my browser history, wiping free disk space on my hard drive, and cleaning out my phone of the day’s calls. I like to keep things clean and tidy in my work office, and that’s more true in my devices.

What Irritates

Some of the technologies that I hate that record everything forever?

• Google Voice. I have to archive phone calls or text messages. I don’t remember which exactly, only that the whole process is convoluted like a dog’s twisted intestines. It drives me nuts and I have muted notifications and would rather not even use it…except that having the convenience of a throwaway phone number is handy.
• Facebook Messenger. I hate to communicate via Messenger, since it’s an open book to Facebook, and I have no doubt they are surveilling all our communications. I have managed to beat back the flood of messages via this tool, but someone always tries to reach me via Facebook, even though a Google search will yield my email addresses. I didn’t find out a family member had passed away for a few months because someone had sent me a Facebook message…when email and phone could easily be found. I can only suppose, it was a courtesy message. “Hey, your half-sister, with whom you only spoke a few times in your life, died. Thought you should know but I’ll do the equivalent of sending you a telegram instead of picking up the phone.” Too harsh? Maybe so…no use getting excited about it now, we’re a year down the road.
• Twitter DMs. Sheesh, I have direct messages going back to 2016, if not further back (I got tired of scrolling). Who knew I wouldn’t be able to clean out these messages so easily? 

I suspect that  tech companies do this on purpose…make it impossible to bulk delete. That’s one of the reasons I switched to Gmail from another provider. The other made it impossibly difficult to delete in bulk. Twitter is no different, making it a pain to delete direct messages since you have to remove them ONE AT A TIME.

Semiphemeral

My hope is that Semiphemeral will do the trick. I looked at several other services, but they all led to dead end websites, or pages that were for sale. Semiphemeral is the only that seems to work. Here’s a little about it:

Automatically delete your old tweets, except for the ones you want to keep. Semiphemeral protects your privacy by making it easy for you to automatically delete years of old tweets while giving you control over exactly which tweets you want to make sure you keep.

What about Twitter DMs?

Twitter only tells Semiphemeral about the last 30 days of your DMs. Because of this, Semiphemeral can’t automatically delete all your old DMs, only those within the last 30 days. For example, if you configure it to delete DMs older than 7 days, each time it runs it will delete the DMs between 30 days ago and 7 days ago.

But don’t worry: Semiphemeral can still delete your DMs older than 30 days. You just need to give it a list of all of those DMs. In order to get this list you must download your Twitter archive from here. When you request an archive from Twitter it may take them a day or two before it’s ready. When it’s ready, you will download a zip file containing your archive.

I can say that waiting for Twitter to provide your archive file can take awhile. It took 24 hours of waiting or so to get the Twitter archive. It was 2.8 gigs in size, but I only needed ONE file out of it. I uploaded the file…

Here’s what the uploaded item looks like…

And the Dashboard update on status of deletions of DMs:

Let’s see what happens.

Update (3 days later):

A few days later, Semiphemeral has come through, removing all my Twitter Direct Messages. Woohoo!

Give it a try!