We are too well aware that much of Twitter’s content is comprised of Blogging the Bodily Fluids Stream — and we know how useless it can be.  Twitter also can be useful when used properly. I am here to tell you that Kickbee is here and is number one in uselessness.  When I tried to visit the Kickbee website, I was met with this warning from Google:

Clicking on the “Why was this page blocked?” button above, leads you to this explanation from Google for Kickbee.net below:

What’s going on here?  Is Kickbee really a scam, sham, or something viral?

Here’s a PR blurp on the device explaining the concept:

You post your first sonogram photo on Facebook to let the world know you’re pregnant and now your yet-too-be-born baby can tweet from the womb? How? Pregnant women can wear a special belt around their belly called the Kickbee, the Twittering fetal activity monitor. When her baby rocks a roundhouse, she’ll feel the little (or big) movement and so with the Kickbee, which will send an update off to Twitter or Dad-to-Be’s iPhone, bragging, “I kicked Mommy!”

Reactions to the device have been so mixed that the creator felt the need to respond to the criticism:

Twitter enables us to share the baby’s movement activity with anyone. Initially, I had the updates set as “private”…so you would have to request permission to follow Kickbee.

Now, this was long before the Kickbee became commercially available and there was just one Kickbee out there. Fine, we don’t have to follow your baby’s kicks. Why make it possible for every parent out there to shove their baby kicks right into our faces?

For the parents who look forward to posting thousands of photos of their children for the world to see (who don’t realize they need to take their children offline, the Kickbee is surely a dream come true. Aww — little Johnny kicked Mommy, let’s tell everyone!

Let’s not tell everyone. Rather, let’s kick the Kickbee to the curb where it belongs.

6 Comments

  1. How utterly strange, Gordon.

    Is this a real product or not, or is it some sort of massive joke?

    I visited the Twitter site for the company, and the website linked from that Twitter page does, indeed, lead one to that serious Google warning about a malicious website — if you have your browser set to provide such warnings.

    1. David,

      I hope it’s a joke for the sake of humanity.

      I know that sometimes if a hacker figures out a web site password, they insert malicious code that autopopulates the whole site with such bad links that Google soon finds it. I had that happen to me once before and the only way to get rid of it was to change my password and upload an archived copy of the web site that had no malicious code in it as every page had been mutilated with malicious junque.

  2. Hi, Kickbee creator here. The Google Malicious site warning has nothing to do with the Kickbee or Twitter itself. Another site on the same hosting server was compromised via a WordPress SQL Injection attack, and thus was able to compromise the directory that contains the website at http://kickbee.net. The compromise has been fixed and cleaned for several days, but unfortunately Google is taking its time to re-scan and update its servers that the site has been cleaned.

    The Kickbee is not available commercially, it’s still a prototype, so no one can buy it yet!

    1. Hi Corey!

      Thanks for popping in and letting us know what is happening with your website, but why wait for Google to act?

      Why not leave Media Temple and find a more secure hosting company for your brainchild?

      1. Actually the problem wasn’t so much with Media Temple as it was an old WordPress blog I had on a separate domain for my account. WordPress is notoriously insecure, and you have to be extremely vigilant with updates (which I wasn’t), so the infiltrators were able to hack a separate domain (kickbee.com). It’s since been fixed. Media Temple was actually pretty good about helping me fix the problem, which I resolved in less than an hour…but I did have to wait for Google to re-scan the domain, which took forever!

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