Now a startup in Nepal has made an app like Snapchat that erases your digital footprint

Aditya Bikram Karki is a startup and tech enthusiast. He runs a travel blog and service called Gorgeous Nepal, and is on Twitter as @adityakong.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about erasable social media. Snapchat is taking the lead, and apps from around the world have drawn inspiration from it, such as BeeTalk from Thailand and Candidly from India. Now a startup in Nepal is looking to push the model forward with the launch of 11Beep.

11Beep launches into private beta today with an app for Android. It’s a mobile-only social network that doesn’t keep your digital history. Its tagline is “Freedom of expression”, so you don’t have to worry about anything you post. That could be useful in a country that’s still quite new to online social media.

The 11Beep app is quite basic right now, but it clearly has elements of Google+ or the Facebook Timeline. New users can search for friends to add within the app from Twitter, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, or a Google account.

Startup experience

Bimal Maharjan is 11Beep’s CEO. He has worked at Indian IT giant Infosys in the past, and has experience of starting several startups, including a stint at the Tech Peaks accelerator in Itay. Alongside him is Vivek Bhusal, the CTO, who’s the lead Android developer at Young Innovations, co-founded app developer Appsmunk, and has a range of apps in his portfolio such as the corruption reporter app I Paid A Bribe.

Maharjan and Bhusal have been working together for nearly two years, be it working at Young Innovations or participating together in Startup Weekend events.

Watching you tweet, watching you work, watching you think

Maharjan explained to Tech in Asia that during his time at Tech Peaks in Italy, he used Facebook and Twitter to do some analysis of his competitors. Collecting all their Twitter and Facebook posts in an Excel sheet, Bimal realized he could find out a lot about those people as a whole – not just about the competitive edge that he was looking for. He says:

The idea that even simple Excel sheet analysis could reveal so much, let alone how much machine learning, semantic analysis and all those stuff would reveal, freaked me out.

That research made him realize how easy it is to paint a picture of someone from existing social networks – not just companies like Facebook and Google, but anyone who takes a moment to look into your social stream. That can cause huge problems.

While reading the book Hatching Twitter and seeing its growth – especially Twitter’s role in Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East – Maharjan became concerned. He says, “Now I wonder what would happen to people who tweeted against their governments and other strong governments in the world.”

No stalking