This is an expansion of the second point listed in the last post.
Basically, I'm starting my little project to distribute local crime and safety alerts through social media mediums.
The goal is to provide a service where it's possible to use social media applications or sub-apps to:
a. receive real-time crime and safety alerts pertinent to your area or area of interest
b. interact with the administrator of the service - now it's me but it could be a department or company
c. possibly interact with other users of the service (?)
For the moment I'm going to focus on Twitter, and from there Facebook.
It's easy enough to post information to an account, and RTPPhySec is set up and ready to go.
I'm thinking now about how to get the alerts themselves, and if the posting to the Twitter account should be automatic
or manual.
For now at least I think it will have to be manual because there is really no reliable format I can find from local police, news or corporate sources that I could just feed into the account. If I could get the news sources to preference their alerts with "Crime Alert" than I could just filter them out of their RSS feeds. Or better yet - the best thing would be to get them to create specific feeds for crime alerts.
From what I've seen though - a lot of police departments have a hard time keeping that kind of thing to strictly alerts, and I doubt subscribers to the service want to be alerted to a police department's spring engraving picnic.
This would just be one aspect of using Twitter for physical security.
Although it's not the focus of this initial project, if subscribers could be broken down into "alert groups" than that group could be used by other members in emergency situations to communicate with subscribers nearby.
If anyone has any ideas, suggestions or issues let me know! Feel free to email if you'd rather not leave a comment.
