A bit old according to ‘net standards – being from October, 2007 and all – but just picked this up from Casey’s blog and it got me to thinking…

TwitterWhere is an application that allows you to view Twitter Tweets by location via RSS or XML. Along with other Twitter-based apps (such as TwitterVision and TwitterMap, mentioned even on the TwitterWhere page) it’s a cool little extension of Twitter that gets geeks excited simply by being a neat remix of data.

My first thought upon seeing this was “cool, I can watch and anticipate flash mobs and the like by location!” which made me stop and consider - “Hey, anyone can watch and anticipate flash mobs by location!”

Undoubtedly some savvy government type entrenched in an office somewhere – Homeland Security, local police, et. al. - also had this “duh” moment, and maybe even wrote their own app eons ago.

Curious how the march of technology can so thoroughly enable certain activities – spontaneous congregation – and also by virtue of the community principles involved in the technology (Web 2.0 mentality, social networking, open api’s, etc…) so thoroughly short circuit it.

I don’t think that uses of Twitter for flash mobbing will go away, or that they’ll be necessarily ineffective in the future, but anyone seriously considering exploiting these tools for truly nefarious purposes has undoubtedly moved on to more promising methods.

Link to TwitterWhere

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tags: flash mobs, smart mobs, twitter, twitterwhere

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at Mar 12, 08 | 9:03 pm and is filed under Just Noumenon Posts, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.