Clean up your foul social media profiles the Simple way

Ever experienced the  panic of a friend request from your boss? Or noticed his name among your new Twitter followers, and realised the filth he may be about to trawl through? Or even worse…have you suddenly woken up to consider what a potential employer might find on your social media presence that could hamper the job hunt?

Never fear, there is a solution to this thorny problem. Mashable alerted us to  a Facebook app called SimpleWash;It’s designed to take a quick look over your profiles to render them squeaky clean. It scans your Facebook profile (or Twitter timeline), looking at your comments  and detecting key words that might deter a future employer (for example drugs, alcohol, profanities and so on).

You can check out all the flagged content, click what you want to remove and be transferred directly to the Facebook post, where you can delete or hide it.

Something else you might find useful is the ability torun a custom search to make sure you’ve not  voiced any negative opinions about the company you have just applied to. (For example, “Thanks for the massive increase in premiums State”).

There will be posts you won’t  want SimpleWash to remove (for example, the entirely innocuous “Been selected as starting Hooker the local rugby club” could be misconstrued by a computer to indicate  potentially seedy night-life activity.) But it is still a good way to quickly review messages you’re sending out to the world.

SimpleWash is available in Facebook and Twitter; the Twitter version is in Beta.