While waiting for a bus on St. Paul's Grand Avenue today I found myself wishing I could turn to my smartphone to find the location of my bus. Waiting is more frustrating when you don't know how long you have to wait. Aboard the bus, I sent one of those "wouldn't it be great if ..." messages on Twitter and learned in short order that several agencies around indeed using GPS and other technologies to to allow bus-tracking by riders.

It's happening to various degrees in Portland and New York, San Francisco and Helsinki (podcast), and a bunch of other cities (including my own town of Alameda, CA) via NextBus.

The fact that I didn't know I could track the buses that run on my own street suggests transit agencies need to do a better job marketing these features.

Ah, the things I learn from my friends on Twitter...

UPDATE: Metro Transit in the Twin Cities is now employing GPS technology to allow customers to track bus departure times. More later.

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Facebook this week said it fixed a security hole that exposed the birth dates of members during a public test of a new design. Normally Facebook users choose whether to keep their birthdays private from other users.

Security researcher Graham Cluley, who discovered the privacy breach, says it's good policy to never give out your date of birth to a Web site if you can help it.

UPDATE: Facebook did not directly respond to Cluley's recommendation that users provide false dates of birth. Instead it sent, after my radio deadline, the same statement it provided to every other newsie:

"For a brief period of time, a small number of users were able to access a private beta of Facebook's new site design meant only for developers. During that time, some of those users had their birthdays revealed due to a bug. The problem was identified and promptly resolved."