Startup in Nepal launching erasable social media 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.

11Beep tries to solve this problem by letting users choose their audience, so they can select which friends can view posts. Plus, the app lets people set a custom delete time for posts, which can actually be quite long. It’s about balancing the permanent and immediately erasable, at a customizable point between Facebook and Snapchat.

That can help prevent employers stalking and firing employees due to their social media activities, and other actions that worry Nepali netizens, such as visa being denied because of a person’s actions on social media, or a university screening people based on what they’ve posted. Of course, the new app can’t do anything about pervasive government surveillance on the web.

The new app has plenty of rivals, and also faces challenges as a startup hailing from Nepal, which some describe as third-world. But CEO Bimal Maharjan is optimistic, saying that “the concept of destructive social media has already been accepted and validated by the market,” so now it’s a matter of standing out and being seen.
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