Nothing like a freshly mowed lawn. (Taken with instagram)

Attack of the killer man beetles! (Taken with instagram)

Cinnamon roll pancakes! (Taken with instagram)

Just hanging out in a leopard costume. Carry on. (Taken with instagram)

Park! (Taken with instagram)

Trying hard to resist the urge to jump in. Must. Work. (Taken with instagram)

Morning cup of tea (said in my worst British accent) (Taken with instagram)

Cheeeeeeese! (Taken with instagram)

Recently, Twitter released an update to its Twitter for iOS app. With that update came a fairly intrusive new “trends” bar that imposes itself throughout the use of the app.

I haven’t read a single tweet or post from someone who thinks the trend bar is anything other than annoying, and I have to include myself in that.

The problem with the trend bar isn’t so much that it’s imposing. It’s that it’s imposing content that I could not care less about.

Charlie Sheen? #tigerblood? #blackpeoplemovies? Phil Collins?

Those are all trends that are showing up in the trend bar right now and they are all topics I have zero interest in.

For me, this points to a much bigger problem with the Trends feature of Twitter: Trends are not contextual. They’re the pulse of the entire Twitter community, which many times means I’m seeing the pulse of teenage angst and boredom around the world. And as nostalgic as that may be, my almost-30-year-old-with-a-wife-a-kid-and-two-dogs self thinks it’s useless.

Twitter gets touted for its ability to control who you follow and even who follows you, so why aren’t trends contextual to the community of people you follow? Why would I ever, under any circumstance, want to see that Justin Bieber is trending when none of the ~150 people I follow are talking about Justin Bieber?

And that’s why I think the new trend bar in Twitter for iOS is so annoying, because its content is absolutely irrelevant. Its offence is on par with pop-up ads, and I for one hoped everyone had moved on from that.

High Speed Video of Popcorn Popping