A Dragnet for Pee-Wee

My thought was - recruit your friends to flag it with you. When things get stolen you normally tell your friends, who tend to be sympathetic. Better than no flagging, though I admit this can be gamed quite easily of not policed well (one set of users flagging several bikes could be of concern for example)

I'm not sure it's fair to say that every bike sold on Craigslist is stolen, which is pretty much what their "stolen bike finder" tool suggests.

To then offer a classifieds tool seems a bit off... especially since there's nothing to say that stolen bikes are not being sold their either other than their word. But then, Craigslist would surely say that they don't support selling stolen goods either.

Mostly, as someone who runs one of the largest bike forums in the world, I'm unimpressed.

But as I don't like commenting negatively without at least thinking how I'd possibly do it better.

Provenance.

I would love to see something like http://velospace.org/node that provides profiles of bikes, but with the capability of registering the components too.

Such that it becomes a database of bikes over time, you'd see what bits you changed when, etc.

If your bike gets stolen then you have a record that it was yours, and you mark it as stolen and it auto-alerts the police as well as auto-searching classifieds sites. And you'd have a record of anything you changed that helps identify it.

If you sell your bike, you assign the bike to the new owner, and the bike now shows who currently owns it as well as who used to own it... the bike gets provenance. A nice history of what it looked like when, and how owns it now.

With a bicycle provenance database you combine the best of buying a bike, owning a bike and selling a bike... whilst at the same time making it very easy for people to find the bike online if it gets stolen, and very easy to find it if it gets sold online. You have the ability to prove it was yours.

So what I'd like to see are sites like velospace expand into managing the provenance of bikes and for that to be used as a major deterrent to bike theft.

Not likely. This was a self-contained project to scratch our own itch.

We considered the "registry" angle but decided against it since it only works if everyone uses it. We wanted to build a tool that could be useful without needing any network effects to kick in.

Sure, but registries don't have to just be focused on "find once stolen". Who wants to fill that in?

Velospace is a great example of a registry based on people loving their bike and wanting to share it. People use it even without the trace functionality. It didn't need to overcome any network effects, people love posting pictures of their bike online and talking about it only second to posting pictures of cats.

What I'm saying is:

Build something that has such a great utility without your bike being stolen, such that if that unfortunate event occurs you already have a record of the provenance constructed.

If someone builds that, then I will email my 22,000 London cycling contacts and tell them to put their details in. And then I will post on my forum, and then I will email other forum admins (and I know a fair few personally) and say... this is awesome, tell your users too.

And people will do it, because they love posting readers wives pictures of their bikes online and would love to do so yet again and talk about it.

And with all of the avid cyclists reached pretty quickly, the utility cyclists would follow naturally as more blogs, forums and magazines say, "use this awesome registry to keep your bike safe".

Seriously, I'd champion it. I might even build it... #4 on my list of startups to make if Microcosm fails.