14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has made it official, the new Local Trends feature is now available for everyone. It enables users to set their location and see the trending topics from their country or city. For now, the feature has a rather limited location selection, but Twitter says it's working on expanding it. When the feature matures, it would add a new dimension to the microblogging service and possibly make it a real contender in the 'local web' war that's brewing after it clearly became the biggest name in the 'real-time web'.
"As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them. Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level, and today we've fully launched so everyone can use it," Twitter's Jenna Dawn announced.
The first signs of the Local Trends feature popped up last week when Twitter said the feature should be available to all soon. It kept its promise and all Twitter users can now set their location but, unfortunately, the feature is actually useful to only a subset of the site's user base. At the moment, you can choose between six countries and a handful of, mostly US, cities as your location. Twitter says it will add more soon enough but, for now, for much of the world the feature is interesting but useless.
But why are local trends important? Twitter has one explanation: "The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation, but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama's election victory, versus those São Paulo, Brazil?" Obviously, it's not global events that are going to benefit from the feature, but the things that are of interest to only a small community. Knowing that there's been an earthquake in Los Angeles isn't going to mean that much to a guy in Milan, but knowing how things are shaping up in the upcoming local elections might.