I had a dream that I came home and found Mark Cuban sitting at my home computer, clicking through my old Facebook pics and deleting them.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Taking out the trash.” He said.
“That’s not trash,” I refuted, “those are my memories.”
He sighed and spun in my chair, rubbing his eyes as he faced me. “No, Anthony. It’s trash. You have to delete this stuff if you are ever going to have a job.”
Then I woke up. I had dreamt of the future. Mark Cuban’s newest venture, Xpire, is an application that will do exactly what I saw Mark doing on my computer. It will sort through all of your social media accounts to delete old Facebook posts and pics, tweets, pins, grams, retweets, regrams, repins and selfies you thought were so cute or clever at one point but then never remembered to delete.
Why is this important? As in real life, if you don’t take out the trash, it will start to pile up and make your life stink.
Take Trevor Noah, 31, for example. Not a day passed after he was appointed Jon Stewart’s successor on “The Daily Show” before critics objected to his personal character and philosophies, based solely from tweets he had published in the past.
They called him “sexist” and “anti-Semitic,” using his own words, even if intended as jokes, against him.
Mark Cuban tweeted in response:
Xpire launched in June 2014 and allows users to “share what’s on your mind, knowing that it won’t follow you for the rest of your life.”
Cuban explained, “The biggest mistake people make in social media is that they let their posts live forever.”
When applying to school or a coveted position at work, old social media posts and pics can come back to haunt you. It’s best we take Cuban’s advice, or rather, give Xpire a shot.
