Get ready for the shock of your lives, Geek.com readers: the FBI is looking for developers who can deliver a powerful social media monitoring application so they can keep tabs on what’s happening on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. That the FBI wants to monitor publicly available information isn’t a surprise, of course. What’s surprising is that they hadn’t already done this ages ago.
It’s not as though social media is a brand new platform any more, and we’ve seen plenty of evidence before that sites like Twitter provide incredibly useful insight into regional sentiment. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the FBI was quietly seeing if existing social search and monitoring tools could provide the functionality they need — apps like Hootsuite, Seesmic, Brizzly, Tweetdeck, and Radian6.
If they were testing tools, they’ve now discovered that no single app provided all the functionality that the Bureau required. Now the FBI is seeking coders who can put together a comprehensive, multi-tabbed media monitoring monster.
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