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Twitter Expands Trending Topics Locations, Adds Tweet Translation

Source: http://blogs.forbes.com/mikeisaac/2010/11/15/twitter-expands-trending-topics-locations-adds-tweet-translation/

What a day for social media news.

If you haven’t been following, this morning Facebook continuously hyped the importance of communicating with others easily and in the “most seamless way possible” at their San Francisco press conference. And just now, Twitter’s new blog post has yet more feature updates to add to its repertoire.

“Trending Topics,” the feature located on the lower-right side of the Twitter interface that shows the most tweeted words and phrases in particular world cities and countries, “is in high demand from folks in cities that aren’t yet on the list,” says the company’s blog post. “So today, we’re expanding local trends to include 13 new countries and 6 new cities. These new locations include some of our fastest growing markets. More cities and countries to come.”

The new countries include Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Turkey and Venezuela. Amongst the new cities to be found are Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis, Rio De Janeiro, Sydney and Toronto.

A seemingly slight difference, but the inclusion of tracking repeated words and phrases from 19 new global locations isn’t something to be scoffed at.

Twitter has also announced a new translation feature to be eventually integrated, “since Twitter is a global communication tool,” says the blog post, and “there are many different languages spoken in Tweets.”  As of right now, only a “very small percentage of users” have this translation service – powered by Google Translate – “and will be rolling out to everyone over the coming weeks.”

I’m curious to see how the quality of the translations turn out using Google’s plugin – Alta Vista’s Babelfish always seemed to steer me wrong. Hopefully this new integration will work much better.