Twitter updated its site on Tuesday evening to now provide, alongside worldwide trends, local trending topics that display what users are talking most about in your particular area.
For now, Twitter offers either trends in any of six countries–Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States–or in any of 15 cities, which include São Paulo, Brazil and London in addition to the most prominent U.S. cities.
Twitter presents a couple visions of how local trends could make the site a more useful tool for following the pulse of the planet:
“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 [in] São Paulo, Brazil?”
This is the second moderate update to come to Twitter in the last week. This past Friday, Twitter completely overhauled its Suggested Users Lists to recommend tweeters based on category, instead of just popularity.
It is suspected that Twitter will continue rolling out a series of revisions and additions to enhance its microblogging service, which suffered a severe drop in growth last fall, following its blinding rise to prominence in the spring just a few months prior.
According to the latest study from RJMetrics Inc., online metric analysis software developer, only 17% of the Twitter’s roughly 75 million user accounts were active last month. About 80% of Twitter users have tweeted less than ten times.
If Twitter wants to improve those numbers, it not only has to expand its site’s services, but it has to show users why they should be using the site, period.
