Twitter extends Trends to 100 more cities worldwide

Twitter has announced today that their trends feature will now cover 100 more cities around the world. Trending topics and hashtags locally relevant will now be accessible to more people who prefer to keep their fingers on the pulse of their cities.

“Today, we’re bringing Trends to 100 more cities around the world including Istanbul, Frankfurt, Guadalajara and Incheon. With this update, we now surface the ‘most breaking’ news in more than 200 locations,” said Twitter in a blog post.

Formerly known as ‘Trending Topics,’ this feature has become a very useful one for Twitter users in the recent times. With localized information, Twitter Trends have come to the rescue of many during times of emergency and natural disasters. Topics and hashtags pertaining to local incidents are almost always trending and Twitter is trying to expand on this experience.

Twitter is going local!

India too is figuring in the scheme of things for Twitter with trends now available for cities like Kanpur, Indore, Jaipur and Hyderabad too. In all, you can choose between 14 Indian cities on Twitter and view trending topics in them. Metropolitan Indian cities New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata were already having a separate tab for Trends soon after they were launched worldwide.

“People around the world turn to Twitter to talk about a range of topics – from football to giving thanks to sharing information and resources during natural disasters and emergencies. This is why Twitter uniquely captures the pulse of the planet, and the pulse of your city: by surfacing the topics that people care about. We’ll continue to add Trends locations so that it’s easy for more people to quickly see what others are talking about, globally and locally,” said Twitter in the blog.

Twitter expanding its base to more markets means they can expand sponsored trends to a wider audience base. Sponsored trends and tweets is how Twitter is monetising the website. Once in a while a sponsored tweet will show up on your timeline and the sponsored trend on top of the trends chart. The sponsored stories on Twitter look discrete and almost never interfere with your work as compared to ads on other social networking websites.

Twitter also has a feature called ‘Tailored Trends’ that considers your location as well as the people you follow to show you trends that are quite literally made especially for you. A set of algorithms work considering the location and follower factor to show you tailored trends on web as well as on the mobile web, iOS and Android apps.

Trends have been added to newer cities even as news about Twitter and Instagram battling it out over the latter has stopped its support to Twitters card functions. More and more users have been noticing that when a tweet containing an Instagram link is opened, either the images are displaying incorrectly or they seem badly cropped. Instagram has said that it will be associated with Twitter even though their relationship is undergoing a change.

To access the city you’re in or the closest to where you are, you need to check for ‘Change’ in the left panel on your Twitter home page. Navigate it to your country and then choose the city of your choice. Topics your city is talking about will be on your page.