Trending topics on Twitter are a great way to see what’s hot right now on the mini social network. However, the topics that trend aren’t always all that interesting to everyone, and can be cluttered with shout-outs to athletes, Justin Bieber, or merely consist of the meme of the day.
Tweets including things like “#ThingsICantLiveWithout” are great for social interaction, but don’t give you a lot of information on what everyone is talking about right this second.
Twitter Music Trends, which was created at Music Hack Day Barcelona 2011 by Adam Lindsay, shows you which music artists are trending in real-time on Twitter.
The app listens to music-related tweets worldwide, using an API from The Echno Nest, which looks for artists being talked about on Twitter.
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The first thing you’ll notice is that the design is extremely simplistic, resembling that of a computer terminal command. The green on black isn’t necessarily the most gorgeous display of data I’ve ever seen, but the data is the key.
Twitter Music Trends splits data up between “Today,”Trending”, and “Latest”. The data from “Today” is a list of trending artists in aggregate over the past 24 hours, “Trending” is happening in real-time, and “Latest” shows artists as they’re tweeted about, in more of a raw streaming format.
The trending page will refresh itself every one second, with the other pages refreshing every two seconds. It’s kind of interesting to sit and watch the tweets roll in about musicians.
Even though Twitter Music Trends was a hack, Adam Lindsay may be on to something here. If the app provided information about the artists, or direct links to iTunes and Spotify tracks, the service could become way more useful than Billboard’s charts, which only points you to MySpace music players. This is the type of information that Twitter holds close to its vest, and could one day become that elusive business model that everyone asks so much about.
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