MILLENNIAL PHONE BOOK
Overview
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Stats
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- Project started: 2014 (?)
- Project status: Done
- Medium/tools: Twitter4j, Java, Processing, On-demand book printning
About
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Long before people gasped in horror as their names, email addresses
and phone numbers were regularily leaked from or stolen by , people
regularily posted the very same information online, publically, for
all to see. I first noticed this happening on Twitter sometime around
2014 (?). People would post a tweet with their phone number and a
message along the lines of “this is my new number. add me!”. The
behavior makes sense. You get a new phone number and need a batch way
to tell your friends to update their address books. Presumably, most
of these friends also have Twitter accounts. So you post the
Tweet. The intentions are innoculous, but the consequences are…
disasterous? Maybe. Anyways. I saw this happening and thought it was a
naive behavior. Looking back, I regret not using my powers more
benevolently. I could have made a bot that identified these tweets and
said something like “are you sure you want to post this information
online?”. Instead, I creating a scraper to search, find, and store the
phone numbers. The scraper collected numbers for a numebr of months,
maybe a year. I built a web app called “Royalist” that acted as a API
into the dataset. A person could enter a Twitter user name and see the
person’s phone number. Like a yellow pages, but online! I gave
Royalist the slogan: “the internet phone index”. The web app was
pretty sophisticated. It was built using Play Framework and integrated
with the Twitter API so a person could join the phone book and
participate in the whole phenom, while also inviting others to do the
same. Later, I took the data in a more low-tech direction. I designed
and printed a “Millenial Phone Book,” which is basically just a list
of the phone numbers and the user names they are associated with. The
cool bit there is that I used Processing to programmatically typeset
the pages. I am unsure what this whole endeavor amounts to. I guess it
was just my way of exploring some things that were happening around
me.
Images
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