Here’s a hint – telling the Twittersphere you’ve left on holidays isn’t a bright idea

Steven Hodson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:59:25 +0000

Even to this day it absolutely amazes me the degree to which people will post stuff on places like Twitter than any sane person would think twice of. It’s one thing to tell the world you’re taking a dump but it is another thing altogether different when you spread the word that you have left to go on your holidays, especially if for some idiotic reason you toss in some BrightKite info.

This however is exactly what an Arizona man did recently, minus the BrightKite info, only to come home after his and his wife’s holidays in Kansas City.

Israel Hyman posted to approximately 2,000 followers on Twitter that he and his wife were "preparing to head out of town," that they had "another 10 hours of driving ahead" and later, that they "made it to Kansas City."

When he came home, he found that someone had broken into his house and stolen thousands of dollars worth of video equipment he used for his video business, IzzyVideo.com, which he uses for his Twitter account.

"My wife thinks it could be a random thing, but I just have my suspicions," he told The Associated Press. "They didn’t take any of our normal consumer electronics."

Source: Security :: cnet news

I think that things like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook serve a great purpose however advertising you are leaving town for an extended period of time isn’t one of them. As we get sucked further into this rabbit hole of the real-time web and our desire to post everything about ourselves to the web we are leaving ourselves open to more and more things like this happening.

Of course when news of an increase of these types of things happening hit the mainstream it will be the fault of the big bad web and not the people who insist on exposing themselves to such a degree.

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Brightkite fails the iPhone Test

Duncan Riley — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:00:15 +0000

Location based microblogging Brightkite gained a lot of attention when it launched in closed beta last year. Brightkite offers location focused microblogging that linked a Twitter style short message service with photos and a users given location.

It was the first location based network I used, and for a short time at least I regularly updated it with my location. But typing your location into a mobile phone can be a bit tedious, and coupled with the need to email photos taken on my phone to Brightkite as opposed to the service being simply able to upload them from the phone, was enough to drive me away. And I wasn’t alone, a lot of the Brightkite user base that I know from earlier this year have given up as well. Not everyone, and there are a few people who still religiously use it, but it fell out of favor.

With the new 3G iPhone supporting GPS, it was an opportunity waiting to happen for Brightkite, an opportunity they still haven’t embraced. A post on the BrightKite blog makes excuses about not having access to a 3G iPhone pre-launch, but my understanding is that the development kit for the iPhone 2.0 software has been available for months. The result: Brightkite, as the screenshots above show, still requires manual entry for location, and still can’t upload photos directly form the iPhone.

I hope that Brightkite gets its act together and that it’s not too late. Geolocation focused services are possibly the next big wave in microblogging/ social networking services, and the first to market with iPhone applications will naturally obtain a strong head start.

The Inquisitr » brightkite

Here’s a hint – telling the Twittersphere you’ve left on holidays isn’t a bright idea

Brightkite fails the iPhone Test