How to Find Local Twitter Users From Your City

May 8, 2008

Twitterlocal.net is a site that lets you find local Twitter users based on proximity to a given location. They got mentioned quite a bit on Twitter today due to a newly created leader board that shows a breakdown of locations with the most tweets over the last 24 hours. The way it works is you supply the location in the form of a zip code or city / state combo along with a selected range within # of miles and it returns a list of the top tweeters in the area.

I decided I wanted to find all users from my city. So I went ahead and entered Chatsworth CA with a range of 1 mile (the minimum). The results came back with only 2 users, myself and 1 other user. Turns out the results only shows users who have sent a tweet within a 24 hour period. It got me thinking about how I can find all users from my city. I couldn’t find a service that does this though, so I had an idea.

I figured I could come up with query to Google to find this so I went ahead and created this query “site:twitter.com location chatsworth ca“. I figured I’d query the profile pages of all Twitter users who supplied their location. Sure enough I got more records. It returned 5 users. This seems to be a nice little hack to find users of your city until Twitterlocal.net offers to show all users or another site comes along that does.

Posted in Guide, Technology