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This article blew my mind with its logic:

Typically, you get 24 hours to watch your on-demand movie. Here’s what happens time and again to my wife and me. We get the kids down, and about 8, we click an on-demand movie to watch. I get sleepy by 9:30 (I work hard, okay?) and turn it off but I want to see the rest of the movie the next day.

Next day, I get the kids down at 8 and—poof—the rest of the movie has disappeared. If it’s free, I have to fastforward through the movie (which is particularly slow and annoying). If I paid for it, then it’s particularly enraging.
With a 27 hours to view the show, all problems solved.

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Jason Fried from 37signals wrote the following:

Over lunch we were discussing how embarrassing it must be for people to document their college years in such detail in on Youtube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc. What looks fun today likely won’t be tomorrow — especially when looking for work.

So we wondered… Wouldn’t it be cool if you could attach expiration dates to images, blog entries, or anything you put on the web? You could say “in 18 months this picture should be deleted” or “3 years from now delete this blog post.”

I know the Wayback Machine keeps archives of just about everything online, but what if expiration dates were a universal truth? So Wayback, or anything else that records the net, would also obey the expiration date rules. It’s your content—why do we assume it has to live forever?

And this is what i had to say about it. Posted, as usual, in my real name:

Yeah, let’s erase yesterday. Sorry, but that is just pathetic, but i’ll explain myself:

Ok, i have not had many embarrassing moments i shared with the internet, but just as an example: i just posted an article about “Scientology”. For sure, that’s a topic not every headhunter or boss will appreciate when looking thru my resume. And i could add the “terminate me in 300 days”-tag to it, that is your idea. But why should i?

Sure, i could change my mind on things and with some things this will probably happen. But this is me, this is me today. And today (which is tomorrows yesterday) is a part of me. And i don’t want to erase that part of my map.

As i said, maybe not every boss will appreciate that part of me, my yesterday, but i want to be employeed by someone who likes me (because i will spend an awful lot of time with those people), and not just my skills. This might sound weird to the business monkeys out there, but that is the true problem.

You are hiring people, not just their skills. You hire their history as well. You hire them not because of that history, but it is part of the deal, eventhough it is just the skills that you pay for.

Example: My current boss knows how i tick. And luckily he is ok with it now. If i find something that sucks, i am the only one in the company who will tell him that “this sucks”. He is still offended because of my tongue, but after he calmed down, he appreciates my honesty and the input. And if he finds out about my “Scientology vs. Christianity” article, he knows that this is just me.

And i want to stay like that, stay like me. And that goes for my next boss as well. If he wants my skills, he has to be ok with the whole package. I wont act like someone else “just to get a job”, my character is to expensive to me, no job can pay for another.

If you smoked dope in high school and that is on the internet, it just shows one part of you. Who didn’t. A boss who won’t understand such basic rules of human life can kiss my ass and is noone i want to be empoyeed to.

That said, i should add that my current job pays not very good.

Now you probably laugh about me and think “You have a bad payed job because you could not pull yourself together. You should have erased all marks of your yesterdays character and history and should have adapted to the companies character-profile.”

Maybe i shoud have, but then i would be just another dull face on the floors passing by.

I could not take the other job that payed better, where i had less work to do, because that boss just wanted my skills, not my history.

But now i got a job where i can stay as i am. While doing it, i keep on looking for a better one. And it will come. And if not, then i still got “me”.

A related article (and discussion) can be found at iA.