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For a week or so, some Twitter users have been seeing a new feature called Local Trends. This feature shows users things that are being heavily talked about at the city and state levels. Twitter has now announced that the feature is live for all users.

"Twitter trends began as a way to shed light on popular conversations. It’s interesting to know that one topic can now spread across the world in real-time, and Trends help us discover which of those topics are paramount on a global scale," says Twitter’s @jennadawn. "As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them."

At this point Local Trends are only available for the following areas:

"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 São Paulo, Brazil?" she continues. "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."

The feature could prove especially helpful for bloggers and journalists covering local news. At the very least, it will show what people are most interested in, in any particular area.

Twitter says it will be improving the feature over time by providing more locations, languages, and data through the Twitter API. There aren’t many locations available yet, but once the feature gets built up it should present an interesting picture of what people are talking about everywhere, which could be quite interesting.

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Simply put, Facebook had a terrific 2009.  This afternoon, comScore provided some statistics that cover the entire year, and the easiest way to sum them up is by saying that double- or triple-digit growth occurred in an impressive eight out of ten categories.

According to comScore, the total number of unique visitors to Facebook increased 105 percent between December of 2008 and December of 2009, hitting 111.8 million before the new decade began.  At the same time, the number of average daily visitors increased by an even greater amount: 181 percent.

Meanwhile, the total minutes and total pages viewed stats rose 198 and 151 percent, respectively.  Average usage days per visitor hit 10.4 (up 37 percent), average minutes per visitor totaled 246.9 (up 45 percent), and average visits per visitor reached 27.4 (up 64 percent).  And total visits increased 236 percent.

The only sort of weak metrics were the average minutes per visit measurement (down 11 percent, probably due to people visiting the site so often), and the average minutes per usage day tally (up just 6 percent).

So Facebook’s certainly starting 2010 in a much stronger position than it entered 2009.  And looking at the tail end of the line in comScore’s graph, it doesn’t appear that the social network’s stats are going to plateau anytime soon.

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The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

"At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that," says Cutts. "It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank."

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

Do you like the way Google handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently? Share your thoughts.

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Some people use their Facebook account like another email address, logging in, checking their messages, and logging out.  Others just add a couple of friends, skim a few status updates, and call it a day.  But data from Pingdom proves that Facebook does a far better job of engaging people than other social networks.

Pingdom recently compared a number of social sites in terms of monthly page views per visitor.  Facebook blew away the competition, scoring almost twice as high as the next-closest site, Hi5.  It ranked ahead of MySpace by a margin of about 2.5 times, and proved almost ten times as engaging as Twitter.

Of course, a post on the Royal Pingdom blog did highlight one potential problem with the rankings, stating, "These numbers are bound to be a bit unfair to Twitter.  Many of its users rely heavily on applications to access the site and don’t necessarily spend much time on the site itself."

Still, Facebook’s win seems pretty undeniable, and the margin of its lead is even more impressive if you consider the size of its user base (350 million people, according to an official blog post published early this morning).

Pingdom observed, "This is bound to be extremely good news for Facebook’s income from advertising."

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Each month we’ve been looking at Twitter’s growth in terms of new user registration and number of Tweets. Last month we saw a decline in the number of new Twitterers in November continuing a trend that began in July.

In December, however, new Twitter user registrations leveled out. Number of tweets grew significantly, and the number of tweets from new users grew as well, possibly indicating that people aren’t just signing up for Twitter and not using it.

These numbers were supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer of Twellow. He says, "Twitter surpassed 1 billion tweets for the month, a 30% increase over the 892 million tweets sent in November. They also surpassed the 100 million user registrations mark by adding 7.123 million new accounts, just barely reversing a negative trend in new user registrations over the last several months with a 0.1% increase over the 7.116 million registrations in November. The number of tweets per user registration jumped almost 21% over November to 11.5 tweets per registered user."

"For the year, Twitter registrations increased almost 545% over the the number registered on January 1, 2009, while tweets sent per month increased in December 1,514% over those sent in January," notes Daines. "Again, I have no idea how many of these accounts are suspended or inactive, so the actual number of registered accounts might be less than 100 million, but the numbers seem to show growth continuing for Twitter."

The numbers seem to suggest a good start to the year for Twitter. The company also recently made some new hires (including some former Googlers) and has some interesting things in the works, such as new features for businesses and the opening of its firehose, which will lead to a lot more innovation in Twitter apps. Things appear to be looking up for Twitter.

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Over the past year or more, you have probably heard your fair share of people telling you that you need to use Twitter if you hope to have business success. It’s true that there are a great many opportunities and potential benefits to using the service, but do you have to use it? Well, that depends.

Is Twitter Necessary? Tell us what you think.

In a recent interview with WebPronews, SiteLogic’s Matt Bailey said what a lot of people are probably thinking. You don’t have to use Twitter.

Frankly, it’s pretty astonishing how loyal Twitter users are considering the service’s frequent downtime and over-capacity errors. There are plenty of other ways that you could go. In this day and age there are so many marketing opportunities online, it’s ridiculous. However, they require time, and if you’re going to focus a significant amount of your time on one, you better make sure it’s a legitimate way of getting results.

This of course depends on the goals you have and the strategies you implement. As Matt says in the interview, "you need to have a consistent marketing strategy," and you should slow down and look at your marketing plan.

I’ve written before about 8 reasons you need to stop ignoring Twitter, but perhaps that title could’ve been toned down a bit. Think of these things as reasons that Twitter could be a good tool to consider using, because Matt’s right. You don’t HAVE to use Twitter. People are still running successful businesses without it. That said, it does have some advantages. The 8 reasons I discussed in that article were:

1. Twitter Lists
2. The Openness of Twitter
3. Building Valuable Relationships
4. Traffic That Cares
5. Staying Current
6. Connecting with Local Customers
7. Going International and Multi-lingual
8. It’s Still Young

Matt makes a valid point. Twitter may not be the "it" thing this time next year. It may still be as relevant as ever, but times change. I’m sure you remember when MySpace was the king of the social networks. MySpace is still around and heavily used, but it is often overshadowed in discussion by Facebook and Twitter.

Consider your goals (here are some possible ones). If Twitter fits into them, use it. If not, maybe it’s not worth the time. If you want to use MySpace to meet your goals, you might be able to do that.

Twitter is showing a lot of potential though. The company kicked off the new year with a bunch of new hires (including some former Googlers), and is really looking toward monetization and becoming more useful for businesses. With the opening of the firehose, a lot of new and existing apps are going to make it possible to do a lot of new and cool things with Twitter. Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone expects Twitter to reach a level of billions of tweets per second.

Do you think Twitter is mandatory for businesses? Share your thoughts.

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> Twitter Starts the Year with Some New Faces

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It seems that a lot of government scientists are betting people will turn to Twitter when Mother Nature lets loose.  Earlier, we wrote about the USGS’s Twitter Earthquake Detector, and it turns out that the National Weather Service has cooked up something similar for storms.

Here’s an official description of how the Twitter Storm Reports program is supposed to work: "The public will submit critical weather reports including a short description of their location (e.g. ‘corner of 10th and Taylor fort worth tx’), and optionally photographs using the Twitter web interface, any number of 3rd party Twitter interfaces, or via a form set up on the NWS web farm."

Then the NWS will sic some software upon the reports and decide whether or not the information should be passed on through existing products.

This approach could work quite well, since information will only come from people who are intentionally participating (in comparison, the earthquake system scans for keywords that can be used out of context).  Also, the NWS has made it quite clear that tweets should include geographic info (whereas the earthquake system has to find location info where it can).

Format your storm report tweets to look like #wxreport WW <your location> WW <your signifcant weather report> if you feel like participating.  Do so after taking cover, of course.

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The fact that reports of earthquakes (or at least messages reading "EARTHQUAKE!!!") are quick to surface on Twitter is a key reason many people first recognized the site as useful.  Now, the U.S. Geological Survey has decided to have a closer look, unveiling the Twitter Earthquake Detector.

An official page announced, "[T]he USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and key word filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking.  This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from people at the hazard’s location."

Of course, a few things still need to be worked out.  Alexis Madrigal noted that Dairy Queen offers a brownie earthquake dessert, and if the fast food company ever decided to give some away, the Twitter Earthquake Detector could well interpret the promotion as the apocalypse.

Also, if a devastating quake did occur, the Twitter Earthquake Detector might not pick up on anything in the immediate vicinity, as cell towers would fall and victims would have more pressing things to worry about than getting their computers back online.

Still, this is an interesting use of Twitter, and the data that’ll be gathered could prove useful.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Starts The Year With Some New Faces

> 2009 In Review – According To Twitter

> Stone Makes Several Billion Tweets Per Hour Prediction

Over the past year or more, you have probably heard your fair share of people telling you that you need to use Twitter if you hope to have business success. It’s true that there are a great many opportunities and potential benefits to using the service, but do you have to use it? Well, that depends.

Is Twitter Necessary? Tell us what you think.

In a recent interview with WebPronews, SiteLogic’s Matt Bailey said what a lot of people are probably thinking. You don’t have to use Twitter.

Frankly, it’s pretty astonishing how loyal Twitter users are considering the service’s frequent downtime and over-capacity errors. There are plenty of other ways that you could go. In this day and age there are so many marketing opportunities online, it’s ridiculous. However, they require time, and if you’re going to focus a significant amount of your time on one, you better make sure it’s a legitimate way of getting results.

This of course depends on the goals you have and the strategies you implement. As Matt says in the interview, "you need to have a consistent marketing strategy," and you should slow down and look at your marketing plan.

I’ve written before about 8 reasons you need to stop ignoring Twitter, but perhaps that title could’ve been toned down a bit. Think of these things as reasons that Twitter could be a good tool to consider using, because Matt’s right. You don’t HAVE to use Twitter. People are still running successful businesses without it. That said, it does have some advantages. The 8 reasons I discussed in that article were:

1. Twitter Lists
2. The Openness of Twitter
3. Building Valuable Relationships
4. Traffic That Cares
5. Staying Current
6. Connecting with Local Customers
7. Going International and Multi-lingual
8. It’s Still Young

Matt makes a valid point. Twitter may not be the "it" thing this time next year. It may still be as relevant as ever, but times change. I’m sure you remember when MySpace was the king of the social networks. MySpace is still around and heavily used, but it is often overshadowed in discussion by Facebook and Twitter.

Consider your goals (here are some possible ones). If Twitter fits into them, use it. If not, maybe it’s not worth the time. If you want to use MySpace to meet your goals, you might be able to do that.

Twitter is showing a lot of potential though. The company kicked off the new year with a bunch of new hires (including some former Googlers), and is really looking toward monetization and becoming more useful for businesses. With the opening of the firehose, a lot of new and existing apps are going to make it possible to do a lot of new and cool things with Twitter. Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone expects Twitter to reach a level of billions of tweets per second.

Do you think Twitter is mandatory for businesses? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Starts the Year with Some New Faces

> Stone Makes "Several Billion Tweets Per Hour" Prediction

> 20 Goals for Business Social Media Use

The fact that reports of earthquakes (or at least messages reading "EARTHQUAKE!!!") are quick to surface on Twitter is a key reason many people first recognized the site as useful.  Now, the U.S. Geological Survey has decided to have a closer look, unveiling the Twitter Earthquake Detector.

An official page announced, "[T]he USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and key word filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking.  This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from people at the hazard’s location."

Of course, a few things still need to be worked out.  Alexis Madrigal noted that Dairy Queen offers a brownie earthquake dessert, and if the fast food company ever decided to give some away, the Twitter Earthquake Detector could well interpret the promotion as the apocalypse.

Also, if a devastating quake did occur, the Twitter Earthquake Detector might not pick up on anything in the immediate vicinity, as cell towers would fall and victims would have more pressing things to worry about than getting their computers back online.

Still, this is an interesting use of Twitter, and the data that’ll be gathered could prove useful.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Starts The Year With Some New Faces

> 2009 In Review – According To Twitter

> Stone Makes Several Billion Tweets Per Hour Prediction