By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo contributing editor
Twitter's ability to highlight popular, or trending, topics is what makes it incredibly useful — and incredibly frustrating.
Useful, because you get an instant snapshot of what's being discussed by people around the world. Frustrating, because so often the topics are hard to make sense of, referring to some aspect of pop culture that I don't care about, or to some Twitter hashtag game I don't care about (recent examples: #OMGthatssotrue, #thatswhatsup, #imthetypeto).
That's where online tools like WhatTheTrend.com come in. It explains, Wikipedia-style, what the heck a particular trending topic is all about. To get a sense of the top 100 trends of last year, see WhatTheTrend's zeitgeist page.
While Twitter can't do much about what people are talking about (nor should it), it has introduced a feature that makes the topics list more useful. Last week, it launched the ability for users to see what is trending in six countries and 15 cities.
When you sign into your Twitter account, scroll down the right rail to find the trends list. As shown in the screengrab above, you can switch from the (default) worldwide list, to one of several U.S. cities, London and Sao Paulo, and six country-level settings — U.S., Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
There is, of course, major overlap between the worldwide list and many local lists (Hollywood celebrity trends tend to be the same everywhere, as do some sporting trends), but it's fascinating to drill down and see what's surfacing in specific places.
From the official Twitter blog:
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?
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.
For hyperlocal news and information sites like DNAinfo, this is another step in getting a better handle on what readers are interested in. The concept of "geo-tagged" data is going to be increasingly important for businesses large and small as they try to identify customers, actual and potential, in specific locations.
In the months ahead, this system will need to get more sophisticated and accurate and less reliant on whatever city or place a user puts into the "location" field in Twitter's settings. Remember how hundreds of thousands of Twitter users in other countries declared they live in Tehran during the #iranelection crisis of 2009?
Every Monday, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan shares his observations on the intersection of media and technology.
