I’m working with some folks now who are contemplating from afar a move to Charlottesville. Years ago, I would go out and take pictures of their As part of their process, they’re doing “flyovers” in Google and Bing to get a better sense of the area (as many buyers are wont to do). But … these respective Street Views don’t offer the flavor of an area … But Instagram does.

Check out “The Beat, a new project from the Rutgers Social Media Information Lab” … better yet, see if you can get a sense of Charlottesville from The Beat.

As the commenter at The Atlantic says, if the geolocation of the Instagram photos gets more accurate, this would be truly, truly useful.

Update 6 December 2012: This post is already outdated, as I suspect that Instagram will be less useful now that Instagram (Facebook) have decided to “prevent its images from showing properly on Twitter’s website and clients” – as I said on G+, The silo-ing of social media is distressing. and leads me to invest less and less in these channels. I so wish Flickr hadn’t failed on mobile so miserably.