Twitter recently introduced Local Trending Topics to tap into the pulse of your city.  It’s a step in the right direction for curating and displaying information that’s relevant on a local scale.  However, if you browse through the different local options, you’ll notice that the trending topics don’t change much.  They also don’t provide much insight or relevancy to their respective cities. For instance, the New York City trending topics don’t really tell me anything unique about NYC, and they’re remarkably similar to those of San Francisco and Chicago.  (Obviously Apple’s iPad announcement yesterday is helping drive these similarities - #itampon appears in every local trending topic.)

Twitter does a great job on tapping the pulse of the nation, but it’s difficult to tap the pulse of a specific geographic region.  Right now all trending topics are national and global issues: Haiti, the iPad, State of the Union, celebrity deaths, etc.  When there are enough tweets to create a trending topic, chances are they’re focused on a larger-than-local topic.

I think there are several actions Twitter can take to help local trending topics become useful:

• Achieve greater scale (duh) and focus on its active user base - the more information the better
• Local curation - it wouldn’t hurt to add an editorial and curated component to help organize local trending topics
• Better algorithms that skim off the popular national and global trending topics and hone in on local-specific data

Local has presented itself as the internet’s next frontier.  There’s a gradual shift from focusing on the general “What’s happening” to the more relevant “What’s happening that’s important to me.”  Twitter has proven to be valuable for breaking news, but they clearly have work to do in breaking local news. They’ve got the momentum and they’re clearly thinking about it.  I think it’s only a matter of time and effort before they figure out the right equation.