Wouldn’t it be nice to find people in your own neighborhood who are on Twitter? One thing Twitter lacks is a good way to communicate with the locals. Twitterers are often wanting to get together in the physical world for business networking, or even just to hang out. Wouldn’t this be a lot easier if you had some Twitter friends that were already close by?

WebProNews is pleased to introduce  a new feature for its Twellow service, which lets users find Twitterers in their own cities, or other cities around the United States for that matter. It’s called TwellowHood, and It is a good way to connect with people who are close to home, but you may not have known were on Twitter.

If you are unfamiliar with Twellow, think about it as a yellow-pages service for finding people on Twitter.  You can search for things or browse the directory to find people who tweet about the topics you are interested in.

"TwellowHood is really all about bridging the gap between the immense world of social media, and the desire for people to find people close to home," Twellow Lead Developer Matthew Daines tells me. He also talks more about how it works at the Twellow Blog:

To use TwellowHood go to the main TwellowHood map at www.twellow.com/twellowhood. This will display a map of the United States (for people outside of the U.S., other countries are coming soon so keep watching this blog. We haven’t forgotten you!). By placing your mouse over any particular state you’ll see the state name and a count of the users we’ve positively identified as being in that state. Clicking the state will zoom in to show you the top-ten cities for the state on the map, as well as a list of all cities that have users in them. The list of cities can be sorted by the number of people or alphabetically.

Once you’re down to this level you can then click on either the map icons or the city name in the list to go to a page listing each user found. Here you can view and choose the people you want to follow, just as you can in our category listings on Twellow. The map can also be dragged and zoomed so you can see the top-ten cities better, or to make it easier to see smaller states and Washington D.C.

Matthew promises that the Twellow crew is working on adding more countries to TwellowHood, so look for it to become more international in the future. He also says that other features will be on the way for TwellowHood. Look for it to go down even narrower than the city level in the future, like down to the zip code.

"With TwellowHood we are working to build tools that help make social media a little bit smaller, without losing the power of large networks of users," says Daines.

Twitterers seem to be enjoying TwellowHood so far:

On a side note, there is an interesting video tutorial about using Twellow with Twitter over at Small Business Coach Online.