Ever popular, socially revolutionary, mind-numbingly boring, information overload. No matter what you think about it, Twitter has become a pervasive feature of the information-age landscape for good or ill.
Often referred to as a micro-blogging service, Twitter (as you’ll know if you pay any attention to these things), lets users broadcast (or Tweet) messages of up to 140 characters. Recently, Twitter has gained not only popularity, but even social relevance, as protestors and activists made use of it during the numerous demonstrations (and more) against despotic rule that have been dominating world events recently.
Twitter Trends
With 5 million odd users, and around 50 million Tweets being broadcast every day, Twitter is a busy place. To help people find out what’s happening on Twitter, the company launched a local trends service at the beginning of last year, that would let users see what the most talked about topics currently were.
The trending topics on Twitter are current rather than cumulative, which means that you get to see what the most popular subjects of recent Tweets are right now, rather than getting a list of the overall most common topics.
And now finally, Twitter has provided local trending services for South Africa, along with 70 other countries in the world. With South Africa’s position as the tenth largest user of Twitter, this has been a long time in the coming, and it’s really nice to finally have this feature.
Finding Local Twitter Trends
To view the local Twitter trends, you’ll need to log into your Twitter account. On the right-hand side, under the heading “Trends,” you can now click on the “Change” button, and select South Africa.
There’s also an option to select a city, but for the moment, Johannesburg is the only city that’s available.
Twitter explains that this is because locations are determined by the volume of Tweets, and right now, they’re not picking up enough Tweets from other SA cities to cause them to show up as a new location. So, if you’re somewhere other than Jo’burg, and want your city to show on that list, get Tweeting.
If you don’t have a Twitter account, but you’d still like to see the local trends for SA, then you can visit Fuseware for a list of the current trending topics for SA, but comparing the two, it seems that the Fuseware site may (understandably) be a little behind the feed in your Twitter account.
Related Articles
You might be interested in these other articles about Twitter:
