LocaFollow: Finding Local Tweeps Made Easy
While Twitter offers a decent search experience, Twitter's own search engine doesn't make it very easy to discover interesting local Twitter users. LocaFollow wants to change this. The service offers an easy to use interface that makes it painless to find local Twitter users by searching through their Twitter bios. Once a search is completed, users are presented with a list of local Twitter users, their bios, a basic set of statistics and their latest tweets.
You could use Twitter's own advanced search to find tweets from local users as well, but Twitter doesn't allow you to restrict searches to its users' bios. LocaFollow, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on searching through Twitter bios.
If you are interested in following all the marketers in Portland, OR, for example, you can do so with just one click - or you select those users who seem to be the most interesting ones by examining their follower numbers and their latest tweets.
LocaFollow uses OAuth to connect to Twitter and this makes it easy to bulk-follow all the selected users with just one click.
Hopefully, once Twitter expands its lists feature, services like LocaFollow will also make it easy for users to immediately create new lists based on their selections. After all, the more users you follow, the more useful these lists become.
There are, of course, other services that allow you to discover local Twitter users. LocalTweeps, for example, lets you discover local Twitter users, but this service doesn't allow you to search for users with specific interests. The same is true for similar services like NearbyTweets or TwitterLocal. TweepSearch makes it easy to search through users' bios, but it doesn't have LocaFollow's focus on finding local users.
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Thanks Frederick. This is very helpful information. I plan on checking LocaFollow out for more efficient and effective Twitter searches.
I dont know about this name. It looks like 'loco' like the name is CrazyFollow in spanish instead of local shortened.
As far as I know, the name comes from Locate & Followers/ings (see background), not from spanish words.
TweepSearch actually allows you to search the location field specifically. For example, http://tweepsearch.com/search?query=location%3Achicago finds tweeps who have "chicago" in their location field.
Geo-based searches coming soon. :)