Quick question: Where are your car keys? Your glasses? Your wedding ring?
If they're not where you thought they were, self-described "civic entrepreneur" Gordon French hopes you'll turn to his Web site, the Official Lost and Found page, where French and a database programmer have constructed what they hope will become the Net's central resource for locating misplaced objects. French claims that his site has already resulted in "dozens" of lost objects finding their way home.
French says he's hoping to provide a service that local police departments don't have time for: matching up lost valuables and their owners even when they end up in different areas of the country, utilizing a custom database that conducts searches precise enough to yield solid matches, but fuzzy enough to know that one man's "cell phone" is another man's "PCS." Even the Net-impaired can consult French's oracle, because losers and finders can call a special number to request report forms by fax, return them to the site, and optical character recognition software will siphon the handwritten information into French's database.
French - a sales rep at a San Francisco Web-design firm - is logging 20 hours a week on his own time to launch the service, because he says he hopes that someday, the site will be used by law-enforcement officials and merchants themselves to boost their own efforts.
"If you leave a camera at a hotel, the hotel won't call you, even though they have records of who was in the room, because they don't want to violate your confidentiality," French observes. "They don't know if your wife knows you were staying at the hotel." (A spokesperson for the Hilton hotel chain disputes this, saying, "Our security officers make every effort to reunite lost objects with our guests.")
Matching up a found object with its rightful owner depends on revealing just enough information about the object, but not too much, French points out, bragging that his service is "safer than the classifieds." A modified Foxpro database analyzes the descriptive language in "found" and "lost" reports and suggests matches, says French. "We do *pre-*matching. If we think there's a match, we provide the owner and the finder with phone numbers so they can talk."
Not all the found objects filed with the service to date have been items of obvious monetary value, French says. A woman who found a trove of postcards in a schoolyard in Daly City, California, 30 years ago, filed a report because she felt the postcards contained a wealth of personal information about the people who had mailed them. Though a global database of objets trouvés might be useful for absent-minded world travelers, the Official Lost and Found page is only effective for tracking things astray in the United States, because the site uses ZIP codes to match locations.
French opines that once the site's effectiveness is widely known, owners of found objects - or advertisers attracted by a high-traffic centralized Net resource - may find it worth their while to subsidize his service. For now, French says he's operating the site on "Internet faith."
"There are a lot of people building things on the Net on Internet faith," he observes. "At least, I could become the world's foremost expert on lost and found, and give lectures about it."
