Geolocation

In yet another weird coincidence, right after I wrote about augmented reality and online integrity this one guy released a little tool called Creepy. Ok it's not such a great coincidence cause a lot of people are talking about these things but, whatever. This tool collects geolocation coords from posts in twitter and flickr. I'm thinking it could perhaps be enhanced to include at least facebook, gowalla and foursquare.

I've never been to Iceland. Really.

Some online blurbs blurbed about how frightening this tool was, so of course I had to try it out. So I grabbed the installer (creepy on github, it's available for linux and Windows, mac version in the works), showed it one of my dirty socks and said FIND!

And nothing came out. Of course. I (@Teodric) never added coords to a tweet.

So I tried with some other people. Politicians. Musicians. Actors. Tech journalists. Friends, even.  One had coords given, in one frickin tweet. Subject of that tweet? "what happens if I check the coords box?" Finally I tried a few Sweden democrats and some pornstars (Wonder if there's prejudice involved here?) but not even those were dumb enough (or cool enough, you choose) to add coords to their tweets.

I did find one tweeter who apparently adds coords to his tweets every now and then, I think to show off where he is today - @Magnusbetner, Swedish comedy guy.

As a scary illustration of how far social media and information technology already intrudes on our lives, I'd say Creepy fails. But give it a year or two and I'm certain it will show interesting things.

The page on github lists the various means the tool has of finding geolocation tags.