X-pire! software will add digital expiration dates to your photos, photo-related embarrassment

Wouldn't it be nice if photos you uploaded to Facebook, MySpace and Flickr just stopped being accessible after a while, saving you the almighty hassle of having to delete them yourself? Well, a few good Germans have come together to produce the X-pire! software, which promises to do just that -- make online imagery inaccessible after a given period of time following their upload. It's been around in prototype form as a Firefox extension, but next week should see its proper launch, complete with a subscription-based pricing model costing €24 per year. Yes, the observant among you will note that this does nothing to prevent others from grabbing those images and re-uploading them, but this software's ambition is humbler than that -- it just aims to give the less tech-savvy (or simply lazier) user a tool for controlling at least part of his or her presence on the web.