There is a lot of “space junk” (parts of old spacecraft, tools, etc.) currently orbiting the earth. Since it could be dangerous if any of these were to fall to earth, NASA handles this issue by actually keeping track of each piece floating out in space.

Similarly, there are a lot of things on the internet that have been “floating around” for years: email messages, Facebook wall posts, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to send or post these things, but have them disappear after a limited time?

University of Washington computer scientists have created a research prototype (read “use at your own risk”) called “Vanish” that is designed to give any data posted on the web a limited lifetime (at this point, 8 to 9 hours) before it becomes inacessible to anyone (including the person who posts the data).

To use Vanish, you’ll need to install both the Vanish system and the Firefox plugin, which requires Firefox 3 or better. Follow the steps here.

Once everything is installed, in Firefox, select the text you’d like to post for a limited time, right-click and choose the “Vanish” context-menu option. The Vanish software will create a PGP-like block of text which you can then send or post. Anyone who has access to this data (for example, an email recipient) who has the Vanish Firefox plug-in installed will be able to read the Vanish-encoded data during the 8- to 9-hour lifetime of the data. After that time, no one will be able to read the data.

Again, though Vanish is a research prototype, it is an interesting concept that data that normally would “live forever” in cyberspace would, in the words of the researchers themselves, “approximate the ephemeral nature of a phone call.” Keep an eye on Vanish. If it becomes a mature application, it could change the way we handle a certain part of our communications.