Twitter Launches Local Trends In 15 Cities

People can now find out what is being tweeted in their local area, after Twitter launched its popular trends feature in 15 cities around the world.

Most of the cities are in the United States, including: New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Seattle, Houston, San Antonio, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.

However Local Trends isn’t relegated to the United States, as the microblog service is also tracking tweets in São Paulo, Brazil, and London, United Kingdom, where Twitter is quite popular. Twitter also tracks tweet trends worldwide and at the country level, including Mexico, Brazil, USA, Ireland, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Anyone confused as to why Twitter is doing this may not properly grok Twitter. The service has more than 60 million users, but like Google, Facebook and any service that adds users by the millions, it’s important to satisfy a broad cross-section of users.

In any sample population of users, there are bound to be those asking for features that help them weed out what isn’t important and pinpoint what is relevant. For example, Twitter users in New York City may want to know what other New Yorkers are saying in addition to what people around the world find popular.

Offering tweet trends localised to the Big Apple could satisfy millions of users in that city, and if there is one thing Twitter wants (now that it has $100 million-plus in funding to play with) it’s scale.

Twitter spokesperson Jenna Dawn explained it as follows:

“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.”

Twitter has already leaned in this direction with its geolocation API, but plunking the Local Trends down right on the page offers an easy way to appeal to people.

Twitter said it plans to add more locations, languages and data for Local Trends and other services in the future.

In another sign that Twitter is growing, the company is hosting Chirp, its first official developer event (on the 14th and 15th of April) in San Francisco.

This will give the programmers who have built more than 50,000 applications with Twitter’s API the opportunity to rub elbows and share ideas with Twitter Founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, as well as Twitter’s Platform Director Ryan Sarver.