twitterのトレンドの意味が分かるbrizzlyとtagalus

twitterのトレンドを説明してくれるサービスbrizzlyがAPIを公開，サードパーティーがtwitterアプリ上でこのAPIを利用してトレンドのキーワードの説明を表示できるようになった。これまでtwitterにおけるトレンドはハッシュタグhashtagから推し量ることが出来たが，奇妙な名前や簡略化しているようなハッシュタグは使っているユーザー同士でしかその意味を汲み取ることが難しかった。Tagalusはそうした意味不明のハッシュタグの意味を定義して説明してくれるハッシュタグ辞典といえるサービス。Brizzlyはgoogle reader開発チームのメンバーだった元グーグラーのChris WetherellとJason Shellenによって作られたサービスで，twitter上のあるトピックがなぜ流行っているのかを説明してくれる。またその定義はユーザーによって編集可能であるのでいつでも情報の新鮮度が保てるものになっている。

One 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.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/lets-be-trends-brizzly-launches-a-twitter-trending-topic-api/

But Brizzly is more than just cute, Thing Labs have brought the powerful ideas and features that make web applications like Google Reader so good at sorting and searching mountains of RSS feeds easily and have applied them to the Twitter firehose of data. And this is no coincidence. The creators of Brizzly are ex-Googlers Chris Wetherell and Jason Shellen, both of whom were part of the Google Reader team.

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/brizzly-does-twitter-better-than-twitter/

Although you can still look up a particular hashtag at hashtags.org, the site doesn't explain what the tag means. (It does, however, point you to photos, videos, and links in addition to tracking the stream.) But if you just want to know what the heck people are talking about, a new resource may be a better option for you: Tagalus, a service that defines hashtags. Think of it as a hashtag dictionary. You can use Tagalus to understand what hashtags mean and see the latest tweets surrounding that subject.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_does_that_hashtag_mean_new_service_tells_you.php