Morning after pill for Facebook fans

The ill-advised Facebook picture or spasmodic tweet which first appals your friends before going on to amuse a global audience of millions.

What could once be lost in the mental fog of the night before now lives on. Friends will despise you, employers will fire you and comedians will lampoon you. All because that smartphone made it far too easy to distribute what you should have kept to yourself.

Fortunately, software developers have taken notice and are developing fixes for your online mistakes. They are calling them "morning-after pills" for your online profile. The latest is Reppler, software that looks for evidence which might come back to hurt you. It keeps an eye on your Facebook presence so you can keep your reputation clean.

It doesn't just monitor what you post but also what others post about you. If a friend photographs and tags you looking bleary-eyed and leery at a party, Reppler will find it and alert you.

As the company puts it: "You are probably not thinking about your image every time you make a status update or post a photo. And there are those crazy posts your friends make on your wall, or embarrassing photos where you are tagged.
Every one of these can have an impact on how others perceive you."

Reppler also helps Facebook users understand which parts of their profile are private and which public, which even for the tech-savvy is not always obvious.

Reppler's initial target is university students contemplating employment. For them, the line between personal and professional is yet to harden. As Vlad Gorelik, the founder of Reppler, explains: "We have multiple facets to our personalities and interact differently with people professionally than we do with our closest friends. It doesn't mean you are being fake and it's not about getting people to stop being connected." A university student today might have 1,000 "friends", not all of whom he or she might want seeing everything they do online.

Another likely audience will be teenagers planning to go to university. Admissions officers often Google applicants and cannot help but be influenced by what they find. If there is a gulf between what appears in an application and the personality presented online, it is bound to hurt.

Reppler not only monitors for mentions of drugs, sex and alcohol, but also tracks the times of day you post and your tone. If your posts are angry, or written during office hours, you might want to change your behaviour in case your boss happens across your profile.

An iPhone app called Last Night Never Happened offers a similar service across all the most popular platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. It describes itself as "the life-saving app that will help you avoid letting those posts spread on the internet and save you a lot of embarrassment". Once downloaded, it allows you to choose the number of hours' worth of posts you wish to delete. After a drunken night out, you can simply wake up the following morning and remove anything you posted in the previous 12 hours, including posts to other people's walls.

Once gone, the posts and messages are irretrievable. Facebook status updates are the only things you cannot remove.