Everyone has had moments of rushing to untag an embarrassing photo on Facebook, and sports administration junior Kyle Leunissen hopes to prevent those incidents in the future.
Leunissen’s new website, MyNightLastNight.com, caters exclusively to hosting pictures and videos of users’ nightlives.
The site launches today and is one of many new websites trying to take advantage of the massive rise in the popularity of social networking sites in the past decade.
When friends began complaining they could no longer post certain pictures or videos on Facebook because of potential repercussions from parents or employers, Leunissen saw potential for a site where users could feel safe posting content knowing it would not be on their boss’ news feeds the next morning.
“My grandma has a Facebook, my mom and dad have Facebook [and so do] my aunts, uncles and neighbors. … I was being monitored,” Leunissen said. “People don’t like whenever their parents watch and follow what they do.”
Leunissen decided to move forward with his idea, and he brought long-time friend and international finance senior Philip Melancon as a managing partner.
The two met with Vision and Growth, a local Web development company, and six months later Leunissen’s vague idea is now a reality.
Anonymity is the cornerstone of My Night Last Night, and unlike most social networking sites that encourage and often require their members to submit personal information, My Night Last Night requires little more than a valid e-mail address to sign up.
Instead of identifying users by their real names, My Night Last Night requires users to invent a unique username that is the only form of identification on the site.
Leunissen believes narrowing the content of the site strictly to nightlife and specifically targeting University students will help differentiate his site from others like Facebook or Twitter.
However, many features are easily recognizable by anyone with a Facebook account. My Night Last Night members can have a wall, post status updates, send out friend requests to other members and “tag” photos and videos.
“If you want a wall, great. If not, you don’t have to,” Leunissen said.
Anonymity doesn’t necessarily mean free reign on content, and while My Night Last Night welcomes the outrageous and edgy, webmaster and finance junior Ryan McLaughlin said site moderators reserve the right to remove anything they choose.
“Under the user agreement of My Night Last Night, when you post a video we can do what we wish in terms of deleting it, moving it or making it private,” McLaughlin said.
Communication studies associate professor Loretta Pecchioni attributes the rise in popularity of websites like My Night Last Night to an age-old fascination with gossip but points out that gossip on such a large scale was not possible before the Internet.
“I think there has always been an interest in gossip and who did stupid things at the party, but there haven’t been records of it that could be kept and shared with people who weren’t there,” Pecchioni said.
When asked whether they would join and contribute on the site, students varied in their responses.
Victoria English, kinesiology junior, said she doubts she will use the site.
“I don’t use Facebook to try and find embarrassing pictures of people, so I doubt I’ll take time to join a site that’s mostly embarrassing pictures,” she said.
Christopher Billiot, sociology freshman, said he looks forward to joining the site.
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Contact Andrew Price at [email protected]