Brighton and Hove joins the Twitter elite (From The Argus)

Brighton and Hove joins the Twitter elite

7:10pm Friday 7th December 2012 in News By Anna Roberts, Crime reporter

Brighton and Hove’s growing army of Twitterati can now follow what’s trending in the city on the social networking site.

The city has joined the likes of Rome, Melbourne, London and Istanbul as featuring on Twitter’s elite list of places where trends are monitoring.

Social media experts said it will boost Brighton and Hove’s growing digital industry.

Jo Morley, digital marketing manager for agency Site Visibility, based in the Lanes, Brighton, said: “This is fantastic news and reflects what a hub Brighton is for the UK.

“This is something that will really help and support Brighton’s digital-based businesses like ourselves by drawing attention to the amount of digital businesses in the area.”

Before Twitter expanded its city trends, users were limited to searching either for UK-wide hot topics or on trends in London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester.

Trend setters

Now 100 more locations have been added globally, including Brighton, Yokohama in Japan and Ottawa in Canada.

Nationally, Belfast, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Portsmouth and Sheffield have also been added.

Twitter says the new function will give the people of Brighton and Hove “a great flavour of what’s happening” in the city.

A Twitter spokesman said: “Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that identifies topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously, so you can see the ‘most breaking’ breaking news rather than just what’s most popular.

“Trends feature all sorts of topics from TV shows, gigs, football matches, elections, and conversation starters like #nowplaying, where users share their music choices with other Twitter users.”

Yesterday Operation Yewtree – the Metropolitan Police probe into sex abuse – and Christmas were trending.

In 2011, The Argus revealed that Crowborough man Iain Dodsworth had sold his company TweetDeck to Twitter for £25m. TweetDeck helps users manage multiple Twitter accounts and organise messages into multiple columns.

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