Little warms a geek's heart like new and innovative data visualizations. With our every activity being tracked and reported as data - including our comings and goings, our preferences and purchases, we too are becoming part of that data graph. While each individual check-in to your favorite location based service may not pique your interest, a visualization of all your activity over months, displayed in chronological order, can take you out of humdrum land and make you look like a person of action.

WeePlaces.com built and released a visualization of FourSquare activity this weekend, and it has already gotten quite a bit of use from those addicted to the new world of geolocation.


Now, all my silly check-ins at 7-Eleven, church, client offices and more, show me racing up and down the Peninsula, with the occasional jaunt into the East Bay (see the embedded video above). If you're a Foursquare user, and you want to relive your own life, start at http://weeplaces.com/foursquare and run your own visual.

When the much-awaited upgrade to Android's core operating system finally made its way to the HTC Evo last week, I mentioned I was concerned it wouldn't knock out a peculiar bug I had seen with my phone, which at times locked it up, or made it take actions I hadn't initiated myself. In the interest of fairness, it is worth noting the bug is gone.

Whether it was solved between Eclair (2.1) and Froyo (2.2) or whether HTC's code was cleaner this time around, I am not sure, but the end result is the same, and I am much more confident using the phone than I was before the upgrade.

Mentioning the issue obviously opened up the potential for criticism from folks who see Google's ecosystem as introducing fragility, but as mentioned when I discussed my intent to be pragmatic, even if I have made a personal choice, I want to be fair, pointing out both what has been great, and what has been less than fantastic. The intermittent locking bug, which emerged just after an over the air (OTA) update from HTC in June, at times threatened to upend my preferences and pull the rug out from my switching away from iPhone. But it's gone, and it's full speed ahead in using the platform which now seems more natural to me than when I bump into iOS on the iPad.

Also gone with the 2.2 update? Many of the application failures that at times popped up from background applications, as mentioned when I first discussed my experience with Evo. While 2.2 wasn't a game changer, in my opinion, adding a few nice features and some speed, the real benefit to me has been making the entire experience more smooth and eliminating issues I had - not a moment too soon.

For the amount of transparency I put online, combined with my preference to purchase things online wherever possible, I have to count myself lucky that nothing nefarious has ever happened to my data. I have never seen false orders on my behalf, been a victim of identity theft, had to cancel accounts and change passwords everywhere, cut up credit cards, or reverse charges due to anything related to my Web use, so far as I can recall. It's possible that winning streak came to an end this last week, thanks to a flag from Amazon, saying that my account had been suspended immediately, due to suspected fraudulent activity. Rather than take their good advice, I am instead hoping I can prove all is well, and the mistake lies with them. Foolhardy, I know, but worth a shot.

I have e-mail receipts of activity from shopping with Amazon.com spanning for more than a decade. Even though I don't use the site as much as I used to, no longer buying books (as I once did regularly) or CDs (long since replaced by iTunes, Spotify and others), the idea of the account getting zapped, and needing to start over with all-new personalization and buying history, seems odd. I am something of an Internet account packrat, and I like the consistency. And even if it seems naive, I still doubt somebody got enough data to make an order on my behalf - as no other account, anywhere, shows one micron of suspicion.

The odd behavior with Amazon started at the end of last month, I bet. When I moved across town, I changed the address associated with my VISA card. Later, I went to Amazon and changed it there as well, including on my Amazon Wish List, which I typically look at a mere once a year, just before Holidays.

A week later, on August 5th, I got an odd e-mail, which was so text-heavy and non-interesting I almost dismissed it as a phishing scam. Entitled "Account Closure: Please Read", the e-mail explained:

"After careful review of your account, we believe it may have been accessed and used by a third-party to place order(s) without your permission. It seems that someone obtained your personal account and/or financial information elsewhere, and used it on Amazon.com to access your account.

We have closed your Amazon.com account effective immediately because of this possible unauthorized account activity. If this recent account activity (HP Pavilion dv6-3010us 15.6-Inch Laptop) was authorized by you, please reply to this message as soon as possible and we will reactivate your account."

Anybody who knows me knows there is no way I would by an HP laptop. Not for me, not for a friend, not for anyone I actually cared about. So it's obvious something is amiss. After checking the message's details and ascertaining it really had come from Amazon.com, I tried to login to my account, and couldn't get through. It really had been closed after all!

Morbidly curious, I checked activity on the credit card associated with the account, and found nothing weird. Similarly, no other account had a hair of concern associated. Every notification from Blippy could be traced to myself or my wife, and Chase, ETrade and Wells Fargo all came back clean. This only reinforced my thought Amazon goofed somewhere. So I reached out this week to follow up, and there's still a ways to go to finding out the truth.

Amazon makes it hard to reach anybody by phone on their site. Clearly with their scale, they want to avoid inbound calls, if possible. To get there, you have to hit Help, find the Contact Us button, and "Sign In to Contact Us". Of course, I couldn't sign in. Duh. So I clicked to skip sign in and found another set of questions to fill out to describe my story. Again, thwarted by tech, I could only put about 100 characters of description to explain. Try that. It's harder than it sounds.

Needless to say, I made it through and the young woman on the line couldn't solve my issue. There's simply no account assigned the e-mail address any more. After a decade's time purchasing on Amazon with the same ID and having them know me as well as they do, I'm locked out.

I completely understand their wanting to protect me as a customer, and stop problems before they start, but something is amiss. If my credit card data were truly compromised, would I not see spending somewhere else? What do you think? Should I convince Amazon they screwed up and get my account on, or should I start canceling and changing passwords everywhere? Either way, whether it is their fault or not, I don't think I will be shopping at Amazon very often going forward. It's a result of unintended consequences.

My late-night speculation on Twitter readying a new feature uncovered not a new way for users to send notices to others on the site, but instead, one of the multiple internal-only accounts used to raise company morale and togetherness.

Sean Garrett (@sg), in the company's communications group, sent an e-mail this morning saying the intriguing account was "not a product", after the discussion of the potential feature had reached ReadWriteWeb and TheNextWeb, among other places.

The entertaining denial and explanation is below:

There have been reports of a Twitter Shout Out™ product being launched on the market soon. We can neither confirm or deny a product at this time. Not even if you ask us really nicely*. However, what we can say is that we are always optimizing for user value and relevance. For example, just the other day Ev was saying that we should totally find ways to "give props" to users adding value on the system in a way that is organic to how people are already using Twitter. Someone told Ev that "give props" wasn't something that people said anymore. Biz -- or was it Jason? -- then said that "shout out" was now a more common vernacular for a "kind mention of a homie" (Urban Dictionary). Anywho, where were we? Oh yeah, Twitter Shout Out™ and that freakin' leak. Or was it a leak? Or was it after-midnight sleuthing? You tell me. Or, maybe the this is all some sort of some special tease to later to be revealed during Dancing with the Stars or, better yet, at halftime of an exhibition football game. Speaking of which, whatever happened with the folks in Up With People? Do you think they are really are still that happy?

*However, what we can say is that it's not a product. It's an internal account where Twitter employees "give props" to each other.

So there you go. It's another episode of my being wrong after midnight. See also: Independence Day Speculation on Brizzly and Foursquare. All part of the fun when you mix real-time discovery and real-time services that operate in public.