Well, sort of. Nearby Tweets just uses the location you stated at registration time, but it’s a very cool user-discovery feature nonetheless. I love an app like this — it does one thing, and does it well. It throws a simple user interface on something that was already available in the twitter API (thanks for pointing that out, Carl), and presto: another layer of value/interestingness gets added to the twitter platform.

They just need a way to link to a particular query — I wanted to share my results for tweets from Iraq, but I’m not able to because the query parameters aren’t embedded in the URL. That’s an easy tweak, and I just suggested it to the author, so with any luck he’ll add it in soon.

nearby tweets – instantly find twitterers nearby (or anywhere for that matter).

Updated 2 minutes later:

Brian Cray, the author of the app, responded to my suggestion:

Great idea Tony! For now, you can do http://nearbytweets.com/search/keyword – for example: http://nearbytweets.com/search/iraq — that being said, I don’t have a URL shortcut for locations yet, though that is in the works. ;)

I love this app — can’t wait to see how it evolves! Local is the next big wave of social media, there is no doubt. The race is on between Twitter and Facebook — who’ll crack the location-awareness nut first? My money is on Twitter — their open model will bring an army of independent developers and entrepreneurs to bear again the opportunity, whilst Facebook’s pseudo-open model (in which third-party apps have been relegated to a marginalized ghetto) will require that their own engineers to come up with the killer LAA* (location-aware app.) Not bloody likely.

* We need a better name/acronym for these. Any ideas?