Foursquare Drops the Dime?

Currently still online, Please Rob Me is raising a lot of questions about internet privacy and responsibility. Please Rob Me tracks Foursquare users who are announcing that they are not home and essentially broadcasts the results from an organized interface. It even goes so far as to draw attention to the time the announcement was made. The founders of the site have certainly made the point that it can be dangerous to write about yourself online, but many are justifiably angry.

There are cases of people being robbed after Tweeting that they would not be home at a certain time, so this isn’t some urban legend to be ignored. The privacy issues, however, can not be ignored either. Please Rob Me is collecting public information, changing the context in which it’s seen and amplifying the audience it reaches.

But when the line isn’t so clear, when it’s not so obviously hurtful, big decisions about privacy and public information are influenced by small groups of people all of the time. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s comment,

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

gave real insight into the mindset of top decision makers at the largest social networking site in the world. His use of the phrase “we decided that these would be social norms” was especially frightening when looked at through an Orwellian lens; the norms are what we say they are.

The Realtime Web Just Keeps Gettin’ More “Real”

A recent TechCrunch article analyzed the actual increase in Twitter usage over 2009. While use on Twitter.com itself remained relatively flat, usage of third-party sites and applications utilizing the Twitter API had grown significantly:

For example, the rate at which bit.ly links are being clicked on is growing at a steep ramp, with more than 500 million clicks (or bit.ly “decodes”) per week. [John Borthwick, betaworks/bit.ly CEO] writes that “last week was the largest week ever for clicks on bit.ly links. 564m were clicked on in total. On the Jan 6th there were a record of 98m decodes.” On January 8, 2009, TweetDeck surpassed 4 million updates in a single day. And Twitterfeed now supports more than 800,000 feeds from more than 400,000 publishers.

Throughout human history, technology has made living more convenient. But it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that the influx of innovation permeated every facet of everyday life. This phenomenon is as relevant now as it was then, with Twitter-related technologies tracking and describing our very movements.

For example, the recent announcement of the Yelp.com iPhone upgrade allowing for location check-ins was widely discussed over the past few days. While tech bloggers discussed its direct threat to Foursquare, another popular location check-in application for the iPhone, one couldn’t help but wonder how the market became so saturated with just this one type of service (we still have Loopt, Gowalla for Android users, and already bade farewell to Google’s Dodgeball earlier last year).

It’s valuable market data that consumers are more than willing to freely provide. And this is just a small segment of the vast network of Twitter-related technologies available. Businesses (and friends) are now more able to track a number of our explicit preferences in realtime. Hopefully this proliferation of personal information means they’re listening, and more willing to provide relevant products and services.