Fighting bike theft 140 characters at a time

This weekend I sat down and integrated a half-dozen city-specific Twitter accounts into StolenBicycleRegistry.com.

I wrote a quick post about using Twitter to find stolen bikes a while ago, but I thought I'd integrate the idea into the SBR and light up a bunch of my own. I've also had a few more chances to poke at the Twitter and Bit.ly APIs lately and, man, they are a pleasure to work with.

So, what does all this mean? It means that when stolen bikes from certain cities are listed in the SBR, these bike details are also tweeted to a city-specific Twitter accounts for greater exposure. People in those cities can follow those stolen bike tweets - and this greatly increases the chance of recovery.

Here's the current list of cities with stolen bike Twitter accounts:

stolenbikesBRK - lists bikes stolen in Berkeley, CA.
stolenbikesTUC - lists bikes stolen in Tucson, AZ.
stolenbikesCHI - lists bikes stolen in Chicago, IL.
stolenbikesPHL - lists bikes stolen in Philadelphia, PA.
stolenbikesSFO - lists bikes stolen in San Francisco, CA.
stolenbikesSAN - lists bikes stolen in San Diego, CA.
stolenbikesSEA - lists bikes stolen in Seattle, WA.

It's easy to add in new cities, so after I give these a bit of of testing I'll likely light up many, many more. If you're interested in having one for your city, drop me a line.

Please help fight bike theft and follow these Twitter accounts! Please help spread the word!