In another move that shows hows much Facebook wishes it could’ve been the first to popularize ephemeral messaging, the company is currently testing a scheduled deletion feature for posts.

First spotted by users and confirmed in a statement, the new feature is running in a “small pilot”. It basically allows users to schedule a time, in the future, for their posts to expire.

Facebook has a new post expiration option? pic.twitter.com/EGH2F0GUKe

— Ben Young (@bwagy) September 8, 2014

“We’re running a small pilot of a feature on Facebook for iOS that lets people schedule deletion of their posts in advance,” said Facebook in a statement to The Next Web.

Based on the posts from users seeing the test, it appears that Facebook will let you choose intervals from one hour to seven days. At the end of the set expiration time, the post will presumably vanish.

If Facebook acting all Snapchat seems familiar, that’s because the company has been doing it quite a bit lately. In June, Facebook launched Slingshot, a Snapchat-esque app that started strong but quickly faded from the app charts. Slingshot wasn’t even their first attempt at a Snapchat competitor either – before that it was Poke. Facebook killed Poke in May.

Snapchatty or not, I can see users getting excited about this feature. Need help moving? Post a status about it that’ll self-destruct in a day or two. For businesses, I can see this feature becoming useful when running contests or promotions.

Of course, Facebook could ditch it entirely. It’s just a small test, the type of which Facebook runs and abandons all the time. What do you think? Would you use it?

Image via YouTube screenshot