A lot of the people whom I met in Vancouver via Twitter I actually met via an app called Twinkle, which was essentially a wrapper around Twitter that added this sort of geographically-located content, and which was released shortly after the iPhone 3G and iOS 2.0 added location-based functionality (but long before Twitter did).
Basically, Twinkle could work on its own or with a Twitter account. When you posted a message, it would go to Twinkle's servers along with geolocation information, and then Twinkle would post it to Twitter in turn. Other Twinkle users could see your post via Twinkle's servers, as well as your actual Twitter feed. It was a fantastic way to discover new local users, and you could scale the radius up or down (from I think 1km to 10km).
I know one person in particular I ended up seeing in my stream a lot because we both lived in one area and worked in another area, and lots of others just worked in the same area as I did. You could easily Twitter-follow them, which let you take those relationships out of Twinkle.
For someone who was completely new to the city and the community, it was a great way to start getting connected to people in the area.
Wow… I had no idea people still remembered Twinkle. I was one of the engineers at Tapulous, back in the day, and worked briefly on Twinkle.
That service was actually a huge disaster for us. The users were mostly tweens, and we had a huge Chartroulette-esque problem with child porn, where users would expose themselves through the service. Our community management team is probably scarred for life. Our engineers also hated it, because its backend was horrendous and we had a lot of availability issues; the service would go down constantly.
The very last thing I did at Tapulous / Disney (on my last day) was kill off Twinkle, shutting down the servers. Everybody was quite happy to see it gone.
Basically, Twinkle could work on its own or with a Twitter account. When you posted a message, it would go to Twinkle's servers along with geolocation information, and then Twinkle would post it to Twitter in turn. Other Twinkle users could see your post via Twinkle's servers, as well as your actual Twitter feed. It was a fantastic way to discover new local users, and you could scale the radius up or down (from I think 1km to 10km).
I know one person in particular I ended up seeing in my stream a lot because we both lived in one area and worked in another area, and lots of others just worked in the same area as I did. You could easily Twitter-follow them, which let you take those relationships out of Twinkle.
For someone who was completely new to the city and the community, it was a great way to start getting connected to people in the area.