Please steal my things

Everyone should know by now that I'm about 2 weeks behind what's abuzz usually. Not by choice, but because I usually don't think what was abuzz was of much importance when it was abuzz. No, it usually takes me a week or two to realize what everyone was talking about. Also, I was going to talk about what I'm going to talk about when it was abuzz, but I played video games instead.

Did anyone catch any of that? Let me try to clarify.

A few weeks ago, I read an article in the trusty Tennessean about a website called PleaseRobMe. Basically, it takes the information people have posted on FourSquare, especially the ones that post their FourSquare updates onto their Twitter pages, and shares them with the world. As I talked about yesterday, FourSquare lets everyone know where you are and how often you visit, earing points or whatever, and making you look cool because you go to Panera Bread 9 times a week. Having a website like PleaseRobMe makes sense to me, it's public information at this point. You tell people you're not home, and that might indicate that no one is home. You're basically saying Please Rob Me. PleaseRobMe is a service not to encourage that people actually steal other peoples shit, but to make others, like me, more aware of what they're actually sharing via social networking. This whole thing goes back to what you should and shouldn't post on the internet. I have become self-aware of my web presence in the past few weeks and how it can be hurtful, because as it was pointed out, you can say things digitally, and someone will eventually read it. Feelings can be hurt, jobs can be lost, et cetera et cetera. But the idea of not telling everyone in the world you are not home, I honestly never thought of.

I remember suggesting to my mom that it would be fun to change the answering machine message whenever we went out to the store or wherever, to tell people why exactly we weren't answering the phone. I felt it would be of service to our friends and family to share that information. She told me it would be a bad idea, because someone we don't know could call to scope out our house to rob it, hear the customized message on the machine and know we weren't home. Makes sense to me. So I abandoned my plan to enlighten our callers. That concept never crossed over to me when it came to updating my Twitter or Facebook. If someone was scoping you out, you just told them you are not home. Bam, no more PS3, laptops, big screen, dog, Wii, blah blah blah. In fact, sharing your whereabouts via a social networking tool is tenfold worse than just leaving a up-to-the-minute status update on your answering machine. People have to actually call you to hear you personalized message on the answering machine. They just have to search you on the internet and wait for you to tell them the information.

You think to yourself, "I have Renters/Homeowners Insurance! I'm good." How much you wanna think they're gonna give you when they find out you told your robbers you weren't home, come take my things? Good luck with that.

So in the future, I'm going to be careful of what I say about where I'm going/for how log. I don't want to get robbed.

(a little P.S. here at the end of this...This took me so long to finally write because the Please Rob Me website doesn't really work properly here on the work computer, and I kept forgetting to investigate the inner workings of the site on my free time at home, so I've been putting it off and putting it off until I eventually just decided to write this blog today even without really checking out the website. If you do, let me know if it's cool or whatever. Thanks.)