Some messages posted on Twitter are valid only for a short period of time. For instance, if you are sharing a discount coupon code that is set to expire in an hour, your tweet could still appear in the timeline of followers who happen to login the next day though that offer would have definitely expired.

Pierre Legrain, who was previously product marketing manager at Twitter, offers a very simple solution to this problem in the form of Spirit. You can set an expiration time for your tweets with the help of hashtags and the tweet will self-destruct after that time has passed.

To get started, you need to log into Spirit with your Twitter account and grant read & write permissions to the app. That’s it. The app will work behind the scenes and monitor your Twitter timeline for any time-sensitive tweets. If it finds one, the tweet will be automatically deleted after the set amount of time as specified by you in the hash tag.

Also see: How to Send Self-Destructive Messages with Google Docs

You can use hash tags like #6m (for 6 minutes), #10h (for 10 hours) or #3d for tweets that are to be auto-deleted after 3 days. You can post tweets from the web, from your phone or even through an email message and Spirit will find it as long as you have added the hash tag in the correct (#\d+[mhd]) format.

If you ever wish to pause or disable Spirit from deleting your tweets, just go to your Twitter account settings page and revoke access to the app.