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If you've used your iPhone or Blackberry to tell your social network that you're diving into Caffeine in SoNo for a quick cup of joe, or standing on the platform waiting on a train into the city, you may never have thought of the unsaid message you've sent: "I'm not home right now." A website, "Please Rob Me," aims to highlight homes left unattended as tweeting homeowners go about their business elsewhere. The site scans posts on the location-based network Foursquare and publishes the results, filtered by user name or location. But it's hardly an instant alert, saying "go to Mark's house right now." When we typed "Norwalk" into the Please Rob Me search box, we got back 15 recent tweets. The most recent--a Twitter user reporting that he was at the South Norwalk Metro-North station--was fully seven hours old. The oldest--a man who checked in on Foursquare while shopping at Stew Leonard's--was positively ancient, hitting the net three days ago. A few of the users listed on Please Rob Me used their real names, but none of course had their home addresses listed, so the true value of the Please Rob Me site to a potential burglar is pretty questionable. The site's authors make that clear in their mission statement, which says that "the goal of this website is to raise awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz, etc." Perhaps mention in your tweets the angry dogs are home?
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