There are several ways to find out who is tweeting near your location.. apart from searching on Twitter ranking lists, you can do a real-time scan of tweets using several tools. Here are some ways you can find Twitter users near you!

1. Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter’s very own Advanced Search gives you the option of zeroing in on tweets from users withint a specific location.See the images below for Twitter’s built-in advanced search. I did a search for ‘Swine Flu’ and ‘New York’. You can click on this link to see the results yourself.

Ever wanted to find out what someone’s first words were on Twitter? Now you can with MyTweet16, a tool which shows you the first 16 tweets ever made by any user. I tried it and found that it couldn’t find the first tweets for some users, usually the ones that registered in 2007 or even 2008.. but give it a try for your Twitter friends or some people you know. It’s fun!

Tweepular is a tool that allows you to get some statistics about your Twitter network. For example, it shows you the twitter users who are not following or your mutual Twitter friends. By looking at the list of profiles and you then click and select them in order to bulk follow or unfollow all these users.

All in all, its a convenient way to manage your Twitter friend network. It’s quick and easy to use although they still require your username and password. Let’s hope they implment OAuth protocol soon (like other Twitter apps) so you don’t have to give out your password in order to use it.

I’ve seen quite a few Twitter apps and tools out there but never quite anything like Twitter Magnets, a website that allows you to create poetry using cutups of words that you can click and drag into a writing pad. Much like magnetic poetry tiles, the ones you can use to leave cryptic messages on your fridge.

You can shuffle through words by clicking a button and a useful character count in the bottom right corner of the screen makes sure you don’t go over Twitter’s 140 character word limit.

Tweetstats is one of the earliest Twitter analytic tools to be developed and its still fairly popular for good reason. Just by entering your Twitter username you’ll be given several colorful graphs which show how many tweets you make per hour or month, which day you tweet the most, what platform you use to tweet as well as who you talk to the most on Twitter.

It’s fantastically to easy to use and gives you a quick overview of your Twitter activity, how you use Twitter and who you talk to you. You can also input other usernames to get a glimpse at when they often use Twitter and who they interact with.. a good way to find Twitter friends as well.

Ever wanted to easily find out what all your Twitter friends are doing right now? It would be great if there was a way to scan through updates and see what’s happening with a glance.

Now you can with Twitter for Busy People, a simple web-based tool that arranges all your Twitter friends in a grid format so you can easily mouse over and check out what their latest updates are. Just move your mouse over the avatar and it’ll pop-up in a box with a ‘read more’ option so you can actually see more updates without leaving the page.

Who Follows Whom is a simple Twitter tool that allows you to discover the Twitter users that are followed by or following specific users. By entering several usernames (at least two) in the tool, you will be able to find out who they are following in common and who follows them as well.

This might be a good way to find out more new users to follow because if these people are followed by users you like or if they are following the users you follow, there might be some common ground in terms of interest.

Qwitter is a very simple free tool which sends you an email when someone stops following you on Twitter. It even gives you the exact tweet which might have possibly caused you to be unfollow. Just enter your username and email to get set up. No need for passwords.

I think you should probably take this with a pinch of salt because its really very difficult to determine why someone has unfollowed you (except when you ask them directly). The exact moment after they unfollow could be based on several reasons, some of them unrelated to specific tweet.

Adam Wilson, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison managed to update his twitter account by using his mind only.

How did he do that? By strapping a brain-computer interface (BCI) to his head and connecting it to a computer. The electrodes detected signals caused by his thoughts:

Mr Wilson’s Twitter set-up contains an onscreen alphabet. The letters flash in turn, and when the letter that the user wants to type flashes, the system detects a spike in their brain activity, and selects that letter.

‘Retweeting’ is the process of sharing a tweet that you like with your Twitter followers. Basically this involves copying and pasting the whole tweet in your tweet box and adding a ‘RT’ in front of the tweet or a ‘via’ at the back of the tweet.

Most Twitter clients have the retweet function built in but if you’re using the web interface, you can also include a retweet button using a greasemonkey script called Retweet This. You’ll need to use a browser like Firefox or Flock though.

Here’s a screenshot of my web interface with the retweet button added: