People love the new "everything is social" movement (twitter, FB, etc) and now color. The problem is that people don't realize what they are exposing and the conflict of interest is that these companies want EVERYTHING exposed so they can advertise/market.
That's the problem. People just don't get it. Or rather people don't realize the value their personal data has.
Well, I hope this doesn't surprise anyone. I'm running under the assumption that people who use Foursquare and other such geolocation services are fully aware that they can be used to find out where they've been. If that assumption is false, I think I'm going to become a hermit.
* Coordinates when tweet was posted from mobile device [side note: is this feature 'enabled' by default on some mobile clients?]
* Place (geographical name) derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. Place gets translated into coordinates using geonames.com
* Bounding Box derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. The less accurate source, a corner of the bounding box is selected randomly.
although I share your hope that people would think more about the implications of their online actions, I'm way more pessimistic even if this is covered in popular main stream media. the numer of people really thinking about such things out of the very few actually reading this in the media, I sadly suppose, is/would be insignificantly low.
Geo-tagging your photos is kinda cool, and it's a feature that I would find interesting if I had a device that supported it, but I would make _sure_ to strip those tags before publishing the photos anywhere.
Would make a good Mac App Store ... app. And, perhaps, web service.
After all, privacy is the new green. On the other hand, you'll need to educate people about the dangers of meta-data, before you can attract them to use your product.
Write in Erlang. Surprisingly, Strip.er and Stripp.er are free...
Eritrea is an unusually disgusting dictatorship afaik, so they'll probably be happy to sell domain names (along with body parts of people with the wrong opinions). Lots of English words end in 'er', right? Another business idea -- offer to administer the top domain.
Unrelated, but I've been noticing that sites like whitepages.com and LookupAnyone.com seem to be showing up higher in Google and many have people's home addresses displayed for free. I saw one that seemed to list almost all of the 12 or so addresses I've lived at in the last 15 years, plus a map with a pin at my current address, and a list of all of my immediate family members. This is all data (theoretically) gathered from publicly available records.
If anyone wants to stop by, just call first. I'm sure my number is on those sites as well. :) Makes me feel like signing up for Facebook.
Does anyone remember an application that uses the information gathered by tools like this to predict where a user will be at any given time? I'm not sure I understand the difference between that concept and what this does?
If no-one has actually built it, then I'm really disappointed as it's quite simple - and I would be pretty easy to locate too. We're all creatures of habit.
Yeap, it gets like this for users with many (>5000) tweets, a big number of which contains some link to image hosting services or foursquare . I guess that the amount of retrieved locations will make up for the wait.
I get the same for people with <1000 tweets, and it eventually terminates with some sort of error. It can't retrieve twitpic photos and returns a 502 for one.
Running it on Windows 7.
I wouldn't be surprised if the error is with Twitter.
