Co Everywhere: Meaningless Peeping On Strangers Or Savvy Geopolitical Tracker?

When Facebook was exploding during my high school years, I often heard "that cute guy from...? yeah, I'm stalking him on Facebook." Though it was a joke (in most instances) the virtual relationship in social media is designed to optimize lurking. Users follow other users, sometimes silently. Admittedly, it's crude way of looking at social media--personally, I think social media brings enormous possibility--but it's not inaccurate.

The new social app Co Everywhere is more like people-watching from a café armchair. Everyone is a passer-by, but in sum they tell you about your setting. Instead of following individual people, on Co Everywhere you follow places. As Rebecca Grant from VentureBeat writes "The app pulls publicly available posts from Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Instagram for those areas, and creates an activity stream with photos, videos, conversations, events, and deals."

Select from pre-programmed destinations, such as The Louvre, MIT, or Fenway Park. Or, draw a circle to follow around a neighborhood on Co Everywhere's embedded map. I'm now following the areas around Middlebury College and the Hopkins Nanjing Center, as well as a section of the Yunnan border, Pyongyang, and Tehran.

So, will Co Everywhere end up as another frivolous way to consume worthless tweets and selfies? Aren't we becoming bloated with the social buffet? Is Co Everywhere a meaningless way to see what people are eating in your hometown; or a savvy new geopolitical tracker, vacation planner, and information aggregator?

I'm not sure yet, but here are some of the potential uses as well as a few of the drawbacks so far:

Potential uses:

• Deals and local events: Draw a circle around your neighborhood to always catch and pay less for the best activities.
• Public events: Co Everywhere lists stadiums as an example, but let's not forget about non-sporting events like medical conferences, Comic Con, meetings of heads of state, and so on.
• Surveillance: Heist situation? Hostage crisis? Maybe not. But draw a circle around your kid's high school or town and maybe teachers and parents will find the surveillance invaluable. 
• Geopolitical tracking: Hear the news first about the areas that matter to you--warring neighborhoods in Libya, ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, or new settlements in the West Bank.   
• Vacation scoping: Can't choose between two destinations? Maybe some hyper-local feedback will help clarify the decision. 
• Daydreaming: It's not as proactive, but sometimes it's necessary. Plop yourself on a beach in Thailand or in the mountains in Europe to get away for a few minutes. 
• Exploring: Maybe you're not planning a vacation or a mental escape. When Google Earth came out with the ability to zoom in on practically anywhere in the world I remember large groups of people gathering around computer monitors dictating where they wanted to see. Maybe Co Everywhere will provide people with a new way of seeing the world. 

Potential drawbacks:

• Filtration: So far the only way to filter content is by drawing smaller circles on the map. To become a proactive information tool the ability to filter content is paramount.
• Map limitations: The Co Everywhere map is simplistic compared to Google Maps. In searching on Co Everywhere I had a difficult time pinpointing exactly the right neighborhood because I couldn't find certain streets or landmarks. I typed in Xishuangbanna, a village and travel destination in Yunnan; it returned no results. Some neighborhoods are still off the grid. 
• User experience: Having only fooled around with it for a day I've experienced a few hiccups, such as an inability to load it on my iPad despite its supposed compatibility and long loading times for drawing/adding new circles. These are small issues, but with so many apps and social options to choose from, users have zero patience and every reason to move on to the next thing.   
• Aggregation limitations: Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram are all Western inventions with predominantly Western users. Despite the fact that Middlebury has a laughably small population compared to Nanjing, the former pulled up more content than the latter because of the sources from which Co Everywhere aggregates data. 
• Selfies: Obnoxious is the term that comes to mind for most selfies I see of people I do know. I have zero tolerance for selfies of strangers. Feel free to take this as a metaphor for all useless personal content. 
• Social overload: Co Everywhere is basically just aggregation of data that exists elsewhere. Maybe people will be content with setting up a location hashtag in Tweetdeck to fantasize about or keep track of what's happening halfway around the world while letting other platforms drop local deal coupons right into their email inbox.