14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter's Trending Topics can be a good way of getting the pulse of the 'information network' at any one given time, but they're not particularly useful for knowing what's going on in your part of the world or your home city. Earlier this year, Twitter started rolling out local trends and it is now expanding the feature to include 13 new countries and six more cities.
"Almost any topic you can imagine is being discussed on Twitter. The most mentioned ones get highlighted as a Trending Topic in real time, letting people zero in on hot news in specific locations as it’s bubbling," Twitter announced.
"Trending Topics is in high demand from folks in cities that aren’t yet on the list, so today, we're expanding local trends to include 13 new countries and 6 new cities. These new locations include some of our fastest growing markets. More cities and countries to come," the announcement added.
The new countries are Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Venezuela, bringing the number to a total of 18 countries where local trends are supported.
There are now 24 cities that get localized trends, the ones that see the most tweets - many of them in the US - but some international ones as well. Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis, Rio De Janeiro, Sydney and Toronto are now supported.
Early this year, just as Twitter was finishing up its first round of full translations of the site, Local Trends were launched. By specifying a location, the trending topics could be catered specifically for you so they would be more relevant to your country or city.
However, the limited selection of supported countries and cities meant that the feature was only useful to a handful of people. Twitter has been expanding it ever since and this latest wave should make local trends relevant to a lot more people.