Valley Exec Twitters Through Home Break-In
(See also: Jon Stewart On Twitter: “I Have No Idea How It Works, Or Why It Is") — A strange man broke into Revision3 COO David Prager's home last night. — Did David call the police? No, he updated Twitter and turned on a live video stream at Ustream.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after O'Reilly Radar explored lifecasting your own home on Twitter, Revision3 COO David Prager pushed the experiment to its logical extreme: broadcasting an actual crime in progress. The episode lands at the peak of 2009 Twitter mania — the same moment Jon Stewart was admitting on national TV he had no idea what the service was for.
First-order effects
- Prager's immediate response to an intruder was to tweet and fire up a Ustream stream rather than call police first — his followers became real-time witnesses to the break-in.
- The stunt instantly generated buzz for both Twitter and Ustream as emergency-adjacent tools, and for Prager and Revision3 within the Valley's attention economy.
Second-order effects
- Broadcasting personal emergencies normalizes turning private crises into public content, pressuring other tech personalities to treat every event — however dangerous — as shareable material.
- It foreshadows the security backlash: when lives are streamed and accounts are the broadcast channel, hijacked identities become attack vectors, as later incidents from hacked executive accounts during the YouTube HQ shooting to Ring cameras compromised and harassed live on air would demonstrate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the boundary between documenting life and performing it collapses entirely — with platforms built for sharing becoming de facto infrastructure for reporting crimes, disasters, and personal danger.
- That same collapse eventually forces a reckoning over platform responsibility: who verifies breaking streams, protects broadcasters, and polices hoaxes when real-time feeds substitute for official channels remains genuinely unresolved.
The trend: This is one early data point in the migration of real-time social media from novelty toy to primary channel for witnessing and narrating events as they happen — including one's own emergencies.