Photo by Junjan

One of the hardest things to do when you join Twitter is figuring out who to follow. Once you've added your immediate friends a good next step is people who live locally. There's a variety of ways to do this – first give http://twitter.mailana.com/find.php a try. Enter the name of your city or town, and it will bring up a list of everybody who's recently Twittered from there. It's a stepping stone to graphing the social networks for every location, so stay tuned.

Another good way to find local people is to use Twitter's built-in search. Enter your location in the 'Near this place' field and it will give you recent messages from people nearby.

To get a list of the most active and followed users in your neighborhood, go to http://twitter.grader.com/location and search for your home town. You'll see a ranked list, it's good to pick up on any local net celebrities you might not know about.