Adorable bookmarklets want to help delete your social media data

A little while ago I wrote about a Lambda function I called ephemeral for deleting my old tweets. While it’s a great project for someone familiar with or wanting to learn to use Lambda, it isn’t simple for a non-technical person to set up. There are services out there that will delete your tweets for you, but require your access credentials. There didn’t seem to be anything that provided convenience without also requiring authentication.

So, I went oldschool and created the ephemeral bookmarklet.

If that didn’t make you instantly nostalgic, a bookmarklet is a little application that lives as a bookmark in your web browser. You “install” it by dragging the link to your bookmarks toolbar, or right-clicking on the link and choosing “Bookmark this link” (Firefox). You click it to execute the program on the current page.

Here’s what the ephemeral bookmarklet will do:

The ephemeral bookmarklet is part of a new suite of tools for personal data management that I’m co-creating with Adam Drake. You can get all the bookmarklets on this page, and they’re also open source on GitHub.

There are currently bookmarklets for managing your data on LinkedIn and Twitter. We’re looking for testers and contributors to help make this a comprehensive toolset for your social media data management. If you write code, I invite you to contribute and help this toolset grow.

∩{｡◕‿◕｡}∩ – Bookmarklet says hi!