pleaserobme.com – Philanthropy or Viral Marketing at it’s Finest?
ForTheHack launched http://pleaserobme.com/today – a site that essentially filters and displays a stream of Tweets that link to a user’s real time location via the 4 Square Website.
It also let’s you search for people based on their location and Twitter username.
When you really break it down the site does not really provide anything outside of what 4square already offers (especially considering the stream links out to the 4square website.) It should also be noted that it does not actually list the empty home’s address despite the site’s claim.
So why did they do it?
The site creators claim:
The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.
The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.
I think there might be a little more to it than that…
The obviously controversial/humorous context of the site has already caused a stir on Twitter and the blogosphere. The creators of the site will wake up tomorrow to a wealth of inbound links from bloggers (they are already are on Tech Crunch), tweeters and disgruntled 4square users. They may even collect some revenue off of that obligatory Google Adsense ad…
As an internet marketing and social media enthusiast, I commend the guys over at ForTheHack for coming up with such a clever marketing tactic and raising some awareness about the possible dangers of location-based services.
