Please Rob Me

I just got back from two days at Netport in Karlshamn, discussing ‘the location-based experience’. Such seminars typically end up in discussing obstacles, like 1) how expensive map data is (in Sweden, at least) 2) that we cannot rely on only GPS data in ‘serious’ location-based services and 3) privacy. This while social and game use of location data is spreading like wildfire.

This seminar (partly) avoided the trap. What I found most interesting  was the discussion on how location data has started to mashed with established social network sites like Facebook and Twitter (and not just used in decicated social network services like Google’s Latitude). The privacy issue was still high on the agenda, though. One service that came up was Please Rob Me, a critical design based on the status lines produced by Twitter and FourSquare that include the location where the message was published. Please Rob Me does a simple search on Twitter to collect all such messages, publish them online and just adds a simple line in front of it, ‘NN just left home:’