Let's Be Trends: Brizzly Launches A Twitter Trending Topic API

Screen shot 2009-09-22 at 3.42.25 PMOne nice feature of the Twitter web app Brizzly is that it has an explanation for why each trending topic on Twitter is popular at any given moment. And because these explanations are user-editable, they’re always up to date. Now Brizzly wants to share that data with the launch of “Let’s Be Trends,” its trending topic API.

The idea is to have other Twitter third-party developers use this data in their apps. Let’s Be Trends features both “current trends” and “get trend” actions that will allow apps to call the most recent popular topics on Twitter as well as the explanation for any one trend upon search, respectively.

“Brizzly users are coming up with awesome explanations,” co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. He wouldn’t share any exact stats for how often users update these trending topic explanations, but says they do so “quickly.” Quite vague, but based on my own usage of the site, it certainly seems true.

While landing third party apps for this data would be great, the big fish to catch, obviously, would be Twitter. Currently, it uses the third-party service “What The Trend?” to display information about trending topics. Right now, it only shows that information on the main Twitter homepage when you’re logged out, but it has been rolling out showing the data across the site. When that happens, the provider of that data should be in very good shape.

Brizzly, which is a product under Shellen’s Thing Labs, has been steadily rolling out improvements as it nears a public launch.