This story was too good for it not to be one of my five blogs for today. So basically, Joshua Kaufman’s laptop was stolen in San Francisco back in March. He reported it to the police and they did nothing because, let’s be honest, as awesome as Josh’s laptop is, they probably had more important things to do.
But this thief stole the wrong laptop. Kaufman had a piece of software on it called Hidden that allowed him to take pictures with his webcam from a third-party location. So… he got all these hilarious shots of the dude who stole his laptop.
Finally in May, he posted all his pics on a Tumblr blog called ‘This Guy Has My Macbook‘. As he says on his blog, his Tumblr post didn’t go viral until he tweeted it, but once he did that it was nuts.
I watched the blog as it went viral and it was awesome! I sent this tweet out about it yesterday.
The internet is getting so powerful now and there’s a real sense that people want to help out. Retweeting Kaufman’s tumblr blog was a small random act of kindness that thousands did… it’s kind of beautiful if you think about it.
So the rest is history now… The police finally looked into it after the blog went viral and this morning Kaufman posted on his Tumblr that he now has his laptop back.
This is a powerful cautionary tale for laptop thieves everywhere. Thousands of tech savvy people will have this app on their laptop now. I’m sure many thieves were watching this go down and are now fearful that their stolen Macbooks might be watching them.
I don’t think this would have happened online five years ago. However, because of new social tools the web has become a much more viral place. This is just one of a thousand cool case studies to show how people are using social media in really unexpected ways.
Two other amazing social media stories as of late were the girl who accidentally captured the Nasa Shuttle taking off into outer space, and of course my favorite, the dude who accidentally live tweeted the Osama Bin Laden raid.
I can’t wait to see what happens next!
Follow Jason Pollock on Twitter.
