I’ve been thinking recently about trending topics on Twitter and how it would be brilliant if there could be some kind of local trending system that picked up trends in a local area. Twitter already has location based searching, so it should be pretty trivial for a developer (albeit one with more skill than me)

Step forward happn.in, which allows you to see trending topics based on a pre-defined list of cities. Birmingham (the UK one) has an entry, so, after finding out the system had an api. I got cracking on playing with it.

The result is Brumtrends (updated broken link, thanks to @prettysimple for pointing this out!) and it displays trending topics as a tag cloud with a lovely photo of Brum’s skyline. I knocked it up in about half an hour, so be kind!

I would like to expand on this, with maybe a widget for blogs, but, for now I’m taking a ‘wait and see’ approach. At the moment it seems to only take a few tweets for something to trend, and trends don’t seem to change too often. Hopefully this will get better though, and this will grow into a really interesting insight into what’s going on in the Birmingham digital community.

• Please note: I wrote this post on the train using the Wordpress iPhone app (just to see if I could more than anything!), so apologies for any dodgy typos!