14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter already owns the real-time information game and now it's making a play in another hot web trend, local info. Some users have begun noticing a new feature dubbed Local Trends, which does exactly what you'd expect: it lists the trending topics in your area as opposed to globally. Twitter has confirmed that it's testing the feature but very few people are seeing it right now. When the feature will be rolled out to everyone, Twitter may very well become the best place to get the latest info not only from the world but from your own home town as well.
“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,” Twitter told Mashable. Twitter is staying quiet for now, apart from acknowledging that the feature is live, but it looks like it may be seeing a wider roll out, perhaps even enabling it for everyone, very soon.
The feature itself isn't revolutionary in its functionality; it's probably something that Twitter could have introduced months ago. Users can select a location for the trends they get in the sidebar and they can choose between countries and even cities though right now only 15 US cities are supported.
It most likely makes use of the new geolocation features introduced a couple of months ago but with so few people using it, it can't rely on that data alone. Instead, it gets the user's selected location and probably does an IP lookup as well to determine the location of the tweets, making it not particularly accurate but probably enough for the trends to be relevant. The feature should become a lot more powerful if more people start attaching geolocation data to their tweets but even now it turns Twitter into a powerful player in the local market, which is hotly disputed among the big web companies.
