I meant to make my own comments about it, but HN was not allowing text for some reason.

My cousin called me a few months back and said she was trying to basically stalk a celebrity while in NY. She was demanding that I make an app to do that.

I LOL'ed. Then I got to thinking about software that uses crowds to do cool things (like Kickstarter, reddit users searching for the Boston Marathon bomber, etc). So I decided to build it.

4 months later, #spotted was born. I'm still kinda rolling my eyes a bit embarrassed that I used precious time to build this thing.

When a person is spotted, all of their twitter followers (that use the #spotted app) get a push notification. Hopefully something positive comes out of it after all.

Thats right, you are right.

Hard to get the common public to learn to read it though. After all, its better to have a weaker 'substitution cipher' that people can read, than pure hieroglyphic language (that only CS kids like us can/want to learn)

The interpreter wouldn't be hard to write, but how to teach hieroglyphic composition, on a keyboard? Tall order.

This is v1. v2 will have a smarter designer. :)

I designed it for to provide a single layer of 'glance encryption' to give people the ability to obtain ambient information from push notifications without sacrificing privacy.

The alternative is the current model: private personal messages on push notifications.

Working on making it better.

"Glance encryption" is better referred to as obfuscation. People naturally understand how to use emoji in context to other statements they're making. This is an emoji argot, an obscure language used to throw off casual spying.

Yes, I had to quickly add the ... single layer...in front of the glance encryption.

Argot. nice word btw. How to make this better? Any ideas?