Evil Bob Is Here

it's really not that long of a story, but here goes. i like to fiddle around with online things. i'm a "product manager" by trade, so i approach things from the desired end result and work backwards to see how i can make things happen. i knew foursquare had an api, but had never looked at it. so when i saw the mayor of the north pole "experiment", i was intrigued with the idea of pretend foursquare achievements.

i came up with an experiment unrelated to evil bob and hacked something together using the foursquare check-in api in about an hour. i won't go into that because i'm still waiting for my neighbors to notice it. then the same afternoon i got wind of the pleaserobme thing that was getting a lot of attention.

but pleaserobme struck me as missing the mark. sure, when you check in someplace on foursquare, it means you are likely at that place, and not at home. so what? most people are away from home all day monday through friday, which is when most burglaries take place (at least where I live). and to think a "robber" is going to go from knowing some person is at some non-home place because they saw a twitter update, know or find out where that person lives, assume nobody else is home and then go rob the place is just a little bit of a stretch.

but some people seemed pretty unaware that foursquare updates through twitter do reveal information about yourself. as a foursquare user, i see a lot of my friends checking in at "venues" that are actually their homes, so i thought an experiment around that would be more interesting and revealing.

it became quickly apparent that finding "home" check-ins was really simple searching twitter, and i thought what would be fun was to create an undesirable person who would also check in at your house. i'd already written the bits around the check-in api, so getting a foursquare user to check in at somebody's house was easy.

so you go to the venue page for your house and it says "who's been here" - and that is you and "evil bob". good times. click through one of my homepage links to see the effect. still cracks me up. "evil bob" is menacing in a non-descript way, which is perfect. and, yes, evil bob's image is that of "killer bob" from twin peaks. maybe david lynch won't send me a DMCA notice if I help sell some twin peaks dvds. Seriously, great show.

from there, i thought about how to really show people that making your home a "venue" at foursquare isn't that great of an idea. evil bob tweeting about his visits was good, but I figured more could be done to illustrate the point. through a combination of evil bob's foursquare history rss feed and foursquare's venue api functions i was able to fetch information - the lat/long coordinates, address (if given), "mayor" (if any), and the link to the "mayor's" foursquare profile (the "mayor" of a specific address on a quiet cul-de-sac where nobody else has checked in. think he/she lives there?). marry that with google maps, have the wife craft a quick ui and there you have it.

i didn't create any scripting around finding "home" venues. I just manually search twitter from time to time, check out likely "home" venues and pop the venue id into a form that puts evil bob there and subsequently tweets out his location, updates his facebook wall and refreshes the feed that updates this site. i can also search foursquare for "home" type venues and uncover a ton of home addresses, but i won't publish them here (any more ... now that we're live) because the person didn't explicitly make them fully public through twitter.

the point? no grand one; just an illustration that all this "social sharing" really is just that. and i get the sense that a good number of people playing around with foursquare and twitter are somewhat unaware of the implications. if you're a chronic over-sharer, you probably know what you're doing. but if you're just jumping on the "social" bandwagon and having fun, you might not. if evil bob helps raise some awareness, great. if not, it was a fun thing to work on for a couple of days.

i do see at foursquare that they plan to roll out an option to make venues you create visible only to friends. that would be a good thing.