Localized Social Media Listening Can Happen

Some people who have seen this application in action will say “this is like the NSA! It’s Spying!!” OK, well if looking at you standing on the pitchers mound, at Fenway Park, from the nose bleed seats, on a clear and sunny day, is “spying” then, yes, EchoSec is guilty.

This in a feature from SteamFeed…

A spin off of GIS mapping software developers CloverPoint, EchoSec has managed to merry global mapping with Social Media feeds, to deliver location based posts and conversations from a variety of platforms. Simply put, you select an area on the map and EchoSec populates the map with all the Social Media posts that have happened, or are happening. As I watched EchoSec‘s CEO select an area of a large Canadian city, icons for Twitter, then Instagram, then FourSquare, then Flickr, all started to populate the selected area. Below the map were the posts themselves, ranging from the mundane to the shocking. No amount of surfing Social Media would ever get me the same number of feed views that I saw with simply a click and drag of the mouse.

All of what I was seeing was available to any user in public. All of it is accessible through a search or surf of any of the apps featured. All of it available to the map thanks to the location based services of the mobile device, laptop or computer, being turned on. No black hat hacking here. Just good old open data.