I’m a hypocrite. Yes, a year ago I heaped scorn on the idea of me writing about Twitter.
Now, I’ve not only written about it, but I just spent 3 days building a tool that analyzes trending topics.
Check it out at HighTweets.com.

How HighTweets works

Every 5 minutes, HighTweets grabs the latest trending topics from the Twitter Search API and stores the result in a database.

Twitter’s ‘trending topics’ list shows you the hottest topics on the service. Since there are umpteen bazillion people using Twitter now, it’s not a bad measure of what’s going on in the online world.

Then HighTweets pulls all of the data together and shows:

• Mass: Topics ranked by the number of times they’ve repeated on the trending topics list. Mass tells you which topics have staying power.
• Velocity: The number of times per 5 minute period that a topic has shown up on the trending topics list. Velocity tells you which topics are on the rise.

The results look like this:

It’s free, no registration required, etc.

Unless Guy Kawasaki shows up and offers me a million dollars (OK, I’d take $10,000 and an autograph) this tool will remain free and open to the world. Enjoy.

Caveats

The domain just propagated. If you get the nasty Network Solutions parking page, wait a few hours and you should see the site.
I built this over the weekend. THE WEEKEND. I am a geek. But that may mean I finished one line of code, went for a bike ride, then wrote another one. If the site explodes when you visit it, please let me know so I can fix it.
I’ll be adding date range selection later.
Same goes for graphs of activity around a topic.
If hitting Twitter’s search API every 5 minutes doesn’t get me in trouble or kill our database server, I’ll likely speed up to every minute. But for now, I’m staying at 5.
Yes, I know that the site’s title shows up as “Twitter Trends Anal…” in Firefox tabbed browsing. You’re not the only sicko here. It was an accident. I’m not changing it.
No, I will not start referring to Twitter users as “Tweeple”. I can’t do it. I’m sorry.
Have a look, enjoy, and let me know what you think:
[ HighTweets.com: Twitter Trends Analysis ]