*Still Unsure which Flat to Burgle This Weekend? Ask Twitter!

Twitter posts containing local information might be used to indicate empty flats/houses, thus inviting burglars to break into the property while the owner/tenant is away.

I stumbled across the Please Rob Me service on the Basic Thinking Blog and once again it shows that the information is out there and just waits to be used. This is already the second service based on public twitter feeds I am posting about. The first service, TweetPsych,  creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account, based on the traits that are used more or less frequently by the user analysed.

I am in a bit of a hurry working on my thesis and my upcoming presentation at the IRIS 2010, so I’ll save the words and invite you to follow the links to Please Rob Me and TweetPsych yourself. For more information about the topic of social media services being a rich source of data mining please refer to my previous post on that topic.

The flats of following twitter users should be empty now. To find out where they live just analyse their previous tweets and after a little data mining you should be able to find out.

That’s the coolest thing since Siemens mobile phones giving you a delivery confirmation for all mobile text messages (sms) sent 😉