Twitter Trends finally go local

Twitter, a local site for local people
Twitter, a local site for local people

Twitter's trending topics have been given a local flavour, so fans of the service can now see what particular subject is becoming popular in their home town.

Although the service was announced last week, it was a soft launch. Now Local Trends is available to all who use Twitter.

"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," says Jenna Dawn, of Twitter, in a blog post.

"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."

Nuances in our world

Trending topics have been one way to keep up with the zeitgeist on the social-networking service.

Everything from the recent Haitian earthquake to the Obama election victory have been trending topics on Twitter – with anyone contributing to the topics by simple adding a hashtag before the topic's title.

"Local Trends will allow you to learn more about the nuances in our world and discover even more relevant topics that might matter to you," continues the blog.

"We'll be improving this feature over time to provide more locations, languages, and data through our API."

As to whether the service is actually down in Acapulco, we have no idea. But instead of facts getting in the way of a terrible pun, let us know if you are Mexico-bound and experiencing any Local Trends difficulty by Following TechRadar on Twitter.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.