awesome and terrible at the same time

17 February, 2010

The pledge: “Listing all those empty homes out there”

It’s a cool idea - it basically takes twitter updates that say the user is not home and aggregates them into one page…

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

It’s a good point, but the overall effect is somewhat scary and disturbing. It takes an ocean of information and pre-filters it for nefarious means. I think a slightly better way to make their point would have been to anonymize the data before putting it online.

(There is some nice Progressive enhancement in the design though.)

And… I shall be too scared to tweet about being at the airport ever again!