Tech & Biz

Twitter Launches Local Trends: Location-Based Trending Topics

by amyellensoden | January 22, 2010 at 03:29 pm

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Twitter launched a new service today that is already trending on its own site and creating online buzz. Thousands of tweets are currently rolling out repeating the words "Twitter Launches" concerning the launch of location-based trending topics. The product is being called Local Trends and allows Twitter users to follow trends by country and city. Local Trends will gradually be unveiled, with only some countries and cities available as of today.

The current available countries for Local Trends include: Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, United Kingdom, and the United States. The Local Trends city selection currently includes popular cities such as Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, and Sao Paulo.

The product is officially called Local Trends. In a statement to us, Twitter said the following:

“We’re rolling out local trends to 1 percent of users today, but we’ll share more information when it reaches a larger audience hopefully sometime next week. We’ll keep you posted when that happens.”

While Local Trends is only available to about 1% of Twitter users at the moment, in the coming week it will be widely launched with more locations and availability. The Local Trends option is located under the Twitter Lists section. The Trending tab can be changed from Worldwide to select a more specific location from Local Trends.

Testing for Local Trends is reportedly still in the works, but if all goes well this could be available to all Twitter users very soon. Local Trends will definitely be a useful option to access in terms of finding out about local events in specific places. It should also be useful to people who travel a lot and find their whereabouts often changing. Overall, Local Trends will undoubtedly lead to increased social networking within individual cities as trending topics will become more and more specific to each user's location.