Twitter Adds Local Trends, Leaves Some Of Us Scratching Our Heads
Posted on 27. Jan, 2010 by Jared Degnan in Social Media Tools
It’s said that everything in politics is local. I guess twitter decided to test that notion on a larger scale when they rolled out the ability to view top trending topics by location early this morning.
For me, it seems like Twitter is having a little too much fin with those little little pop-ups.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for new ways to parse the conversation and understand what my local tweeps are up to. I just think the feature is a little too self-serving.
We’ve already gotten to a point where “twitter trends” are filling in for real news. Now, Twitter is bringing the looking glass even closer to our faces with a new way to find hard-hitting trending topics like #nowthatsghetto.
It might be different if the search feature actually zoomed in on local twitterers. Instead though, it draws from the same general twitter stream global trends are drawn from.
What you end up with is just another “oh, look at how cool I am, I wrote about something popular” moment.
If Twitter is supposed to be a collective reflection of the real musings of the online masses, then search needs to remain largely organic. Adding one more layer of “what’s popular now” will only draw the walls of the echo chamber ever closer.
