Prompt's Blog

Whenever my family leaves for vacation, we keep the upstairs light on and arrange for our neighbors to take in the mail. "This way," my mother reasons, "Burglars won't know we're not home."

Foursquare, a location-based social networking website, has gained a ton of popularity recently. The website encourages people to connect and explore their communities, particularly local businesses. Members earn points by 'checking-in' to locations, unlock 'badges', and become the 'Mayor' if they accumulate the most check-ins at one location.

When a lot of people start using a new social network, it's almost guaranteed that some won't get the point. People who check-in to places far from their usual neighborhood are exposing that their home is empty, and those who check-in to their homes might as well broadcast their address for all to see.

This is where Please Rob Me comes in. The "dressed-up Twitter search page," as proclaimed by its founders presents 'opportunities' to visitors to 'Please Rob Me' when it appears someone is not home. The website's main aim isn't to help people burglarize homes, but rather to point out the dangers of publicly telling people where you are.

Burglars and other would-be predators have every reason to pay attention to social media, however. British insurance and investment management firm Legal & General found that almost 40% of social networking users share holiday plans on sites like Facebook or Twitter. In addition, 13% of Facebook users and 92% of Twitter users accept follows without checking up on the source.

The main point: Be careful about what information you share on the web. As Please Rob Me creators reasoned, publicly telling people where you've checked in is dangerous because it leaves one place you're definitely not: home. And if you've checked in to the airport 5 minutes ago, that upstairs light won't fool anyone.

Labels: Facebook, Foursquare, Please Rob Me, social media, social networking, Twitter

Twitter Chief Scientist, Abdur Chowdhury announced Twitter's top trending topics of 2009, reminding us of some of this year's most notable events.

Michael Jackson topped the micro blogging site's trending list of people, while Harry Potter and the Twilight saga's, New Moon led the pack for movies. The swine flu made a few appearances across multiple categories, Google Wave led the tech category (Tweetdeck came in third, and Windows 7 came in fourth), the New York Yankees (Woot!) made the top ten in the sports category, and #musicmonday was the most used hashtag in 2009.

Click here for the complete lists.

Labels: 2009 Top Trends, Twitter

Dan Martin, ed. businesszone.co.uk, only accepting PR from Twitter. Punchy, catchy copy. Single 140 char. tweets. http://tinyurl.com/b3wfjs

Labels: BusinessZone.co.uk, Dan Martin, tweet, Twitter

Identi.ca stormed onto the social media scene a couple of weeks ago as the open source microblogging alternative to Twitter. This happened amidst the dreaded Fail Whale continually appearing because Twitter's servers were constantly overloaded. It seemed to be the perfect fix, and yes, many people signed up for Identi.ca. Identi.ca was exploding and everyone was Twittering about it. It's a great idea to have a communal microblogging site developed by a community. So people started flocking to Identi.ca, if only to have a working microblogging platform.

But then, Twitter bought Summize. And a strange thing happened, Twitter started becoming a lot more useful and solved a lot of its problems with downtime. When I first looked at Twitter, I noticed right away how crippled it was by not having a search engine on the site. Summize started as a search engine that offered users an easy way to follow conversations about topics posted on Twitter, complete with RSS feeds that gave people easy access to tweets on what they were interested in. Now that Twitter has integrated search into the program, it's even easier for users.

So, with the main reasons to switch to Identi.ca, the problems of search and downtime, gone, only open source purists will leave Twitter. Twitter still is free and has the largest community of microbloggers, who have remained dedicated even with the problems. The community behind Twitter will be the driving force in keeping also-rans, such as Identi.ca and Plurk at bay. At least until Twitter's cash runs out. The communications giant needs to figure out how to monetize the excellent traffic it gets, which so far has been elusive. I reserved my Identi.ca name, just in case.

Labels: fail whale, Identi.ca, microblogging, Plurk, Twitter