Yeah, I was aiming at high visibility research for Craigslist shoppers. I'm limited by Twitter, but luckily the bikeindex site looks good on mobile too.

Love the idea but can't totally grok the incentive to lookup the stolen status as a buyer. If I'm getting a good deal why would I care?

1. Reporting stolen bikes makes it harder to sell stolen bikes, making bike theft less profitable - and ultimately making it less likely that you'll be looking for a good deal on a new bike, since your old one won't have been stolen.

2. Some people actually do care.

3. Buying stolen property is illegal

isn't (3.) 'knowingly' buying stolen property that is illegal? but 'unknowingly' buying stolen property would at worst mean you will have to surrender the property to the original owner?

Thanks! It was a great learning experience. A Twitter bot is about the right size to learn a few parts of the language, how to work with gems, and access API's. The BikeIndex API sends nice clean JSON in logical (and well documented) structure, so it's quite easy to work with in Ruby.