DeHood Launches a Foursquare meets Twitter meets Yelp meets Ning for iPhone

When I was a kid, we used to play on the street in front of my house. Yeah, I know – seems like years ago. Nowadays, with children and families spending more time inside watching TV or playing video games; I feel like there’s nobody outside in my neighborhood anymore. In fact, most people don’t know their next-door neighbors.

DeHood, sponsors here at TechCrunch Disrupt, wants to crush that problem. Founded by Babak Hedayati, DeHood is a social network for neighborhoods. They are kind of like a one-stop local social network on iPhone (app available here). The goal is to be a one-stop shop for all the local social networking you need to do.

DeHood launches today with a plethora of features and functionality. Users can share what their doing in the local area via a feature called “local buzz.” It’s essentially a location-based Twitter feed of what’s going on in your local area. You can also stay in touch with your friends and other people in the neighborhood and “check in” to venues when you’re in a local area. Another feature is that you can view a map of the neighborhood and see what shops are nearby.

There’s a website version, which has a lot of the same functionality, but the app primarily lives on mobile. The company is funded by the founder, Babak Hedayati, a serial entrepreneur, and he’s hired a large team of seasoned startup veterans to help him with DeHood.

The key challenge for DeHood will obviously be gaining traction in a crowded space. It has been beta tested with a limited number of users and is only launching today, so time will tell whether Babak and team can figure out the secret sauce of user adoption.