Kenya added to list of local Twitter trends

On Thursday, Kenyans on Twitter, a micro-blogging social media platform, earned more bragging rights after Twitter added Kenya to a list of over 160 countries and locations with visible local trends. One can now see what Kenyans on Twitter are tweeting about and there is a breakdown allowing you to see what is trending in Nairobi or Mombasa. “We are introducing Trends in more than 160 new locations. Included in that list are a number of countries that will be getting Trends for the first time: Belgium, Greece. Kenya, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Ukraine, plus more than 130 new cities in countries that already have Trends,” said Twitter’s software engineer, Trends team, Royce Cheng-Yue (@rchengyue). Trends are simply an easy way to find out what people are talking about at that particular time on Twitter. One can see what is trending across the world, in a given country or a particular city. Trends are important when one want to follow a particular topic without having to follow all the people who are tweeting about it. For example when there is breaking news or a big event happening, one can pick it up from the trends column and follow it seeing every single tweet on the subject from all those who are tweeting about it. A user can change the Trends from city to country to country depending on their preference using the Trends sidebar on Twitter.com (on the left-hand side of the screen). For places that are not yet enjoying this service there is no need to despair. Plans are underway to gradually roll out the service to more locations over time. “We are constantly working to bring Trends to more locations – be on the lookout for even more in the future,” added Cheng-Yue. Currently one is only able to see trends for 42 countries with many having trends customized for individual cities. In Africa only two countries, South Africa and Nigeria were on this list before Kenya was added last week. The move to add Kenya on the list that previously only had South Africa and Nigeria will go a long way in affirming the country’s internet usage credentials as an IT bigwig in the East African region as well as Africa as a whole. As expected the moment this news reached #KOT (Kenyans on Twitter), a new rather witty trending topic was created - #WhyTwitterLetKenyaTrend. Trends on Twitter have been around since 2010. The last update Twitter made to the Trending option happened last December when it added more than 100 cities.