After a night of enjoying the Champaign-Urbana nightlife, one may feel a little too bold at their computer while on social media sites.

With the new iPhone application, Last Night Never Happened, social media activity from the night before can be deleted with one swift click of a button.

Alejandro Gutierrez, doctoral student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, downloaded the app on an iPhone to explore how the process works.

When installing the app, it asks for Facebook and Twitter credentials, Gutierrez said.

It then requires input on what to erase and how far back in time items should be erased.

“The app is positive in theory but in reality it doesn’t give you assurance because anyone may have seen or received the message before it was deleted,” Gutierrez said. “It provides you with a false sense of security.”

The app does not delete email notifications that might have been sent out from the posting or messaging, Gutierrez said. Twitter is also connected to the Google server, and whatever has been tweeted may still be searchable on the Internet.

In addition to tweets and Facebook posts, email is another form of communication that if accessed when one is not in the right state of mind, can potentially be problematic.

Such emails are frequently sent to Eric Snodgrass, professor of atmospheric sciences.

“I usually receive pretty hilarious drunken emails from students and I always make sure to share them with my classes,” Snodgrass said. “Once I got a series of emails from a group of guys who were trying to recreate a frozen beer experiment we did. Students have also sent me random marriage proposals, which I am pretty sure were from males claiming to be females.”

While the Last Night Never Happened app does not have the power to delete these emails students may have sent during the late hours of the night or wee hours of the morning, Snodgrass believes that it is something people will find useful to pull certain things off the web which they may have regretted posting.

However, he does not think that many of his students regret sending him those emails.

Sheila Loberg, freshman in Media, is guilty of this “late night” emailing herself. She said that as a result of this, she has had to go back and revisit the emails the next day to straighten things out.

Luckily for Loberg, her mistake email was an easy mistake to fix. Correcting social media activity is not always as simple, which is why the app can come in handy.

“The app might also be useful if someone’s (social media) account was hacked because then you can delete things that people might mistakenly think are from you,” Loberg said.

Sometimes not thinking about repercussions of one’s social media activity can produce unexpected results.

Loberg recalls a time when she tweeted a picture of a drink she had one night, and her intern boss tweeted back that she hoped she enjoyed it.

While social media does usually serve its purpose, the iPhone app also should prove to be useful in eating up the unwanted aspects of social media, Snodgrass said.

“I’m sure some students would love to be able to recall information they send out the night before,” Snodgrass said. “I have a feeling the app might get used quite a bit.”