Mumbai, first Indian city to get localised Twitter trends

Twitter announced early today that trending topics feature of the social networking website will also be available for Mumbai. Twitter trends were earlier available for India as a whole. Mumbai is the first Indian city to get localised trends.

Twitter trends are the hottest emerging topics that the users of the social networking service are discussing at any given time. This is different from popular topics as the most popular discussions may not make it to trends. For instance, when WikiLeaks was a peaking trend all across the world it did not show up on Twitter trends because members of Twitter had been discussing WikiLeaks for a long time. Though the topic was popular, the velocity of discussion on WikiLeaks was not increasing dramatically, as compared to conversations happening on any given day, to make it a trend. The Twitter trends algorithm uses both novelty of the topic as well as its popularity to push it up on the trends list.

Twitter trends are a good way to follow the latest buzz in a particular geography. For instance, at the time of writing this article, Mumbai Twitter trends showed that the Mumbai Twitterati (Twitter members) were most interested in #agoodboyfriend, #blackberry, Fernando Torres, Rahul Dravid, Rayudu and Baisakhi.

To look at Twitter trends for Mumbai you will need to be a member of Twitter. You can change the trends location from your Twitter homepage by clicking on the change link under the Trends header on the right side of the page.