Written by james | 27 January 2010
Posted in Social Media

Twitter has just made a new feature available to all users! It’s called Local Trends. This will show you what’s being talked about the most in your local area (or as local as the cities or countries they have available for selection). Although there aren’t may places to choose from at the minute, Twitter has commented that they are working on setting up many more.

In order to shed light on and open up popular conversations, Twitter Trends were created. The fact that a popular topic can spread worldwide in what’s described as real-time can be very interesting. Trends are a good way to see what topics are the most important in the world right now, and as more people are sharing what’s happening in their own world, Twitter needs to grow and evolve alongside our ever-growing, ever-evolving society. That’s where trends come in; it’s a great way for people to see if there is something being tweeted that’s relevant to them.

The question is, will it be able to keep up? As people want things more and more relevant to them and their areas will Twitter be able to provide enough options for them to get involved in conversations with topics that they find appropriate in their area, wherever they are. I mean, there are only two options for us, London and United Kingdom. The latter isn’t precise enough and London, well that goes without saying, still not precise for those of us who don’t live in or surrounding London.

But let’s not go off on a tangent. Big events that happen in places around the world will always spread into global conversation, that’s the way news works. But what about the different views that people from different areas have? We can now see that with local trends. And the big events in your own areas, now you can check for them and talk about them with local and interested people. It's a way for you to talk to people who have more similar relevant things going on because they are from your area. This allows you to see if there is anything local you don’t want to miss and to compare what people from, say, New Orleans , think about the death of Michael Jackson, to what people from Russia thought about his death.

This could be a great tool for bloggers, journalists, and anyone who needs to know what is most relevant to any particular area at different times. Twitter definitely needs to improve their feature, and they have said they will do this by giving us more languages, locations and data via the Twitter API. Once built up properly, this will give us a remarkable picture of what is being talked about by everyone, everywhere, which will be very fascinating for us.