The product is officially called Local Trends. In a statement to us, Twitter said the following:

“We’re rolling out local trends to 1 percent of users today, but we’ll share more information when it reaches a larger audience hopefully sometime next week. We’ll keep you posted when that happens.”

The pictures below, courtesy of @lisabarone, show the new feature in all of its glory. Scroll past them for more information on the new Twitter feature.

Screenshots: Local Trends

More Info

Currently, only a few users have access to the feature (I don’t have it yet), but it should be rolling out to everybody soon.

Here’s what we can tell you:

- Local Trends allows you to set a specific location, so that you can see the trends around you. Most of the time, this would be your home. However, it looks like you can change it on-the-fly if you’re traveling, for example.

- Clicking on Local Trends gives you a list of different cities and countries in which you can view trends. It’s a limited list so far — only 15 U.S. cities are supported.

- You can access these trending topics from Twitter.com, on the right-hand column.

- A full rollout should occur sometime next week, if testing goes smoothly.

We think this is a logical and smart move, especially in the wake of the rise of location-based service such as Foursquare. We’ll have more analysis soon.

Social media is not only a great medium for conversation, but it’s also an effective way to discover and analyze the popular topics of the day. By aggregating and picking apart the millions of tweets, status updates, and posts generated on the web every day, it’s possible to figure out what people care about in real-time.

Starting this week, we will be publishing the top ten trending topics of the last seven days, based on the amount of time they trended on Twitter. This data is provided to us courtesy of What The Trend, which tracks Twitter trends and provides user-generated descriptions of those topics.

What Was Hot This Week

Here are some of our thoughts and observation on Twitter’s top ten trending topics for the week:

- Unsurprisingly, the most discussed topic of the week has been the crisis in Haiti. After a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, the world came to the people’s aid, raising millions via text message and other social methods.

- The Shorty Awards, which recognize great twitter users and their content, trended for nearly four days. It’s become more popular than even we predicted.

- Both Martin Luther King Day and the Massachusetts special election between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley took up two trending topics. Martin Luther King Day was on Monday, while the Massachusetts election occurred on Tuesday.

- In the realm of entertainment, Justin Bieber, the Golden Globes, and Jersey Shore were the most talked about items of the weel.

Be sure to scroll down to the end of the post for the full list.

What Might Be Popular Next Week?

What do you think will be the topics people discuss the most next week? We have a few guesses, but we want to hear yours in the comments.

Some of our predictions:

1. Apple’s announcement, including the Apple Tablet and the unveiling of iPhone 4.0.

2. The Grammy Awards, which air on 1/31, will garner a lot of discussion next week, along with some of its singers.

3. The plight in Haiti, as well as ways to help, will continue to dominate the discussion.

Top 10 Twitter Trending Topics, 1/16 to 1/22

All descriptions are provided courtesy of What The Trend.

Today, Google decided to play Santa with Wave invites. It has just doled out significantly more invites to existing users.

In conjunction with the invite rollout, Google is also hinting that they’ll soon reach the one million user mark. The title of their post suggestively indicates that “a million stamps” have been licked, which we take to mean that they’ve now opened up Google Wave to a million users.

While invites may be more readily available, be forewarned: Google is still not ready to graduate the service from preview phase to beta stage. Still, we’re excited that more of you can get in on the shared experience that is Google Wave.

This data is very encouraging for marketers, but a social media campaign must still be managed correctly for maximum ROI. Here are some tips on how brands can best engage their customers by offering what everyone now looks to social media for – a bargain.

New Strategies to Turn Buzz Into Buy

Other recent research confirms the fact that people are increasingly turning to social networks to get deals on products and services. Razorfish found that the primary drivers of “friending” or “following” a brand were promotions and discounts. Over one-third of social network users and 44 percent of Twitter users engaged with a brand through discount promotions. This is good news for marketers, but the stats also pose challenges to the way marketing programs and advertising budgets will be structured in the future.

Brands have long spent big money on commercials, media placements, direct mail, and more. With most of these methods, there is little way to measure the impact on your bottom line. You either get lucky with a surge in sales after your campaign, or it didn’t work. Either way, success or failure was impossible to measure.

If done right, social marketing is a fantastic way to get the best of all worlds from a campaign – wide-scale and targeted distribution of your offer, for free. But to get it right, marketers have to step lightly. If you’re too pushy with too many promotions, your followers will feel “marketed at” or “spammed.” If you don’t offer good enough deals, your customers may become frustrated and stop following you. After all, they don’t really want to be your friend. They want bargains. Here are some steps for getting social media promotions right.

1. What Are People Saying About Your Brand?

Find out what people are saying about your brand, why they are saying it, and who they are saying it to. You have to do more than just get a vague reading on brand buzz. Track the actual pass-along of your brand’s social content via tweets, blog posts, Facebook postings, etc. to see which content is driving the most sharing on which sites. You can use social media traffic tracking software to do this.

Tracking this word-of-mouth buzz is crucial to formulating the right marketing messages and promotions. You must deliver relevant social deals that resonate with people’s interests.

2. Create a Social Promotion

Once you figure out what people want using the tracking methods above, go ahead and give it to them. For example, you might find that everyone loved your last 20% promotion – it was shared to hundreds of thousands of people via social sites and email – but that the most frequent negative comment was that shipping costs were too high. In your next promotion, offer free shipping.

Or, you may find that there was a huge surge in Twitter searches, blog comments, and Facebook updates about your brand’s winter boots during a snowstorm. This is a great opportunity to immediately put out a social promotion for 20% off boot purchases for one day only via Twitter, Facebook, and/or your company blog.

Have fun with your social promotions. Unlike paid search ads and other media buys, you don’t have to plan and budget for them. Instead, just try one or two out and see what happens.

3. Did It Work?

Figure out whether your promotion worked, and what bottom line impact it had on sales and profits. Go back to your social media tracking and measurement tool and find out how much your promotion was shared, what increase it caused in traffic to your website, and what direct impact it had on conversion. You might want to compare two different promotions run during a similar time frame to see which worked better and why.

For example, did a 50% Off promotion drive more sharing, visits, or conversions than a Two-For-One? In addition to doing simple “A/B” tests, compare results for promotions like these against the data from your regular marketing analytics platform to see whether your social media promotions are performing better or worse than traditional paid marketing campaigns. Social promotions almost always perform better than paid media ads in terms of conversion, but paid ads may drive a higher volume of traffic to your site.

Lastly, do an ROI analysis of your social media promotions to find out their real impact on bottom line profits.

Conclusion

Social media promotions are here to stay. Make sure you use the social channel to deliver “exclusive” deals that make your friends and followers feel special. They’ll thank you by making purchases.

What social media tools do you use to increase sales and measure your brand’s reach? Please share them in the comments below.

In their annual Zeitgeist report, Google crowns “Michael Jackson” as the fastest rising search term, followed by “Facebook” in second place and “Twitter” in fourth, with Spanish Facebook “Tuenti” coming in third.

As far as the fastest falling search terms go, unsurprisingly the heaviest hitters of old, such as “Euro 2008″ and “Beijing 2008,” have decreased in relevance, and certain Internet giants, such as Bebo and eMule, have obviously lost their luster.

The full list is below:

Fastest Rising Search Terms (Global):

1. michael jackson
2. facebook
3. tuenti
4. twitter
5. sanalika
6. new moon
7. lady gaga
8. windows 7
9. dantri.com.vn
10. torpedo gratis

Fastest Falling Search Terms (Global)

1. beijing 2008
2. euro 2008
3. heath ledger
4. barack obama
5. amy winehouse
6. kraloyun
7. dailymotion
8. bebo
9. wii
10. emule

Check out the rest of the report, including the US-only data, over at the official Zeitgeist site.

Since its inception, Facebook has been based on networks. First, it was your college and university, then it was your city or region, and now it’s a combination of those, plus companies and institutions. However, Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will be removing regional networks in the next few weeks, but will ask all users to review their privacy settings before the change occurs.

Zuckerberg states in his letter that Facebook has concluded that regional networks are “no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.” However, we’re still unclear as to whether this only refers to locations (i.e. San Francisco) or also refers to colleges and universities. We’ve asked Facebook to clarify.

Facebook has been unloading a wave of new privacy features. In fact, the social networking service has already started removing regional networks several months ago. But now those changes will affect privacy settings, and it seems that Zuckerberg and Co. want to be sure that nobody is taken by surprise. We know what happens when you take Facebook users by surprise.

Here’s the letter in its entirety,

Zuckerberg’s Open Letter to Facebook’s Users

“It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.”

Mark Zuckerberg

The service, however, is a lot like Twitter: It lets users connect with their other Live Messenger contacts and post 140-character messages. There’re a couple of important visual differences between this service and Twitter; old messages scroll to the right, for example, just like in another Twitter clone, Plurk. But it’s still a microblogging service, and one local media report actually called it a knock-off of Plurk, which is also quite popular in Asia.

Juku, which is currently in beta, brings several other innovations to the table; it lets users play games and win prizes, something that sounds like science fiction when it comes to the traditionally feature-shy Twitter. However, at this point, Microsoft hasn’t announced any plans to internationalize the service and perhaps position it as a direct competitor to Twitter.

TechGuruHere Team is giving away google wave invites to his visitors. Don’t worry invites will be given to all those who are active readers of our blog. Daily around 50 invites will be give away to our readers. For getting invite please post your email ids in the comments section. We will be giving them as per we will get free time

Proof:

Thanks for Your Cooperation

TechGuruHere Team

14 Invites Left For Today

Today, Facebook is getting a massive new partner for Connect: Yahoo. The #2 search engine, which is also one of the world’s most visited Web sites, announced that it will be rolling out Facebook Connect on numerous Yahoo properties that in the aggregate represent tens of millions of users worldwide.

Yahoo says that Connect will be integrated on its Mail, News, Sports, and Finance sites, as well as Flickr, allowing users to do things like leave comments, share news stories, and view friends’ feeds by using their Facebook account on Yahoo. Like any Connect-powered service, Yahoo benefits by that activity being shared back on the Facebook news feed, which in turn drives traffic to Yahoo.

This is a no-brainer for Yahoo, who has been trying for years to make its services more social on its own. Now, they’ll start to see some of the benefits that smaller publishers have seen from Facebook Connect (more comments, extra traffic from Facebook, etc.) on a massive scale. The new features are expected to launch next year.

A little over a year ago (August 2008), Facebook reached 100 million users. And now according to AllFacebook, that number is now a staggering 325+ million users.

So just how fast is Facebook’s userbase growing? We sat down and did the math. First, here are Facebook’s major growth milestones, starting from when it reached 100 million users:

- August 26th, 2008: 100 million users

- January 7th, 2009: 150 million users

- April 8th, 2009: 200 million users

- July 15th, 2009: 250 million users

- September 15th, 2009: 300 million users

- Friday, November 6th, 2009: 325 million users

Half a Million New Users. Every Single Day.

So let’s do the math. From September 15th to November 6th, Facebook grew by 25 million users. That’s 53 days, if we include the start and end days. Divide that by 25 million and you get a daily growth rate of 471,698 users per day for Facebook. That’s a small city joining Facebook every single day.

Even more shocking is that the number used to be higher. Between July 15th and September 15th, 63 days, Facebook grew by 50 million users. If we do the math, Facebook was growing at a clip of 793,650 users per day. We’re barely able to come up with the words to describe this type of growth.

The Facebook train has to eventually slow down; there are only so many people on planet Earth with an Internet connection (yes, that’s how big their potential audience is), and it seems to be already slowing. However, if you consider half a million users per day “slowing,” then you know you’ve done something right.

This train’s going towards the sky for a good, long time.