January 27, 2010
At a panel on social networking that took place in Davos, Switzerland George Colony of Forrester Research (@gcolony) said that Twitter usage has peaked at about 75 million users and that traffic has been flat for the last six months.
Another panelist, Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@ev) said a few minutes later that a new Twitter feature called Geotagging will promote growth of Twitter and make it a more valuable social and business tool. This new feature, which allows tweeters to view trending topics based on geographical location, was also the topic of the last Twitter blog post, Now Trending: Local Trends. To illustrate the power of this feature, Evan said that a local coffee shop would be able to keep in touch with its customers to announce new blends or specials, while customers would be able to provide feedback to coffee shop management on things they would like to see.
Twitter users can now select a country or a US state and view the trending topics specific to that area. Twitter says they are going to add new locations and new languages in the future. It will be interesting to see how far they will be able to drill down on the map. Google already has a similar feature in place called Geotargeting, which allows Adwords account holders to limit their advertising campaigns to specific locations.
This new feature will also serve as a valuable tool to measure blog traffic metrics. Bloggers will be able to use it effectively to gauge how interesting certain topics are in different parts of the world and to decide which languages to translate blog posts into.
Disclaimer: I was not physically present at the social network panel at Davos but got to see it by courtesy of Luic le Mer (@loic) who moderated the panel and provided live streaming video of the proceedings.
Related posts:
Comments