Even though Brizzly is in its infancy, the service is clearly thinking outside the box when it comes to providing a new user interface for Twitter, including the in-line display of images and video, Web-based groups, a new approach to direct messages, and most uniquely, the ability to see definitions of Twitter's trending topics, authored by other Brizzly users. Now, Thing Labs, the company behind Brizzly, is debuting a new API that releases all the trend data at a dedicated site called LetsBeTrends.com.As Thing Labs CEO Jason Shellen said today, "The goal is that if you are a Twitter API developer, and you like the trends data, you can use our API. Our Brizzly users are coming up with awesome explanations."
Image: Courtesy LetsBeTrends.com
Although LetsBeTrends.com is fairly sparse right now, you can already see its utility by looking at the code behind current trends, or by peeking at the data behind a specific trend. Twitter application developers may like seeing just when a topic trended and stopped, including a text description. Brizzly's default example is the trend "goodnight", which has a note saying "It's always nighttime somewhere". For more fun queries, like "Kanye West", it says:
"Rapper Kanye West disrupted singer Taylor Swift's winning speech at the VMA's, and proclaimed that Beyonce should have been the real winner. He also appeared on the Jay Leno premier on NBC leading to some speculation about whether it was all a stunt. Later, an ABC reporter leaked an off-the-record comment made by US President Barack Obama calling West a 'jackass.'"Brizzly looks like it intends to be more than YATC (Yet Another Twitter Client). This is the first volley which gives back to the developer community, and more likely are coming. It's not too much of a stretch to see Trends data making its way into TweetDeck, Seesmic or other clients, or even Web services that are tangentially tied to Twitter, such as a general news site.