What the Trend makes me look at Twitter in a new way.
If you want to see what people are Twittering about, just go to search.twitter.com and look at the trending topics under the search text field.
If you want to know WHY things are trending, look at http://whatthetrend.com/
e.g., the trend "Google Earth Helps" is trending right now (April 25, 2009) because of a popular article by TechCrunch's MG Siegler titled "Google Earth Helps Solve A Plane Crash Mystery"
It's a story that's featured not only on TechCrunch, but also the Washington Post.
Here's another trend I noticed: The URL shorteners are getting annoying. Some shortened links are monteized and just put a frame at the top of the page, like owl.ly. Others don't link to the article at all, but they do link to an intermediate page which will then link to the correct content, probably getting some free impression or click juju in the process.
I'm beginning to agree with Joshua Schachter (the founder of Delicious) . He thinks URL shorteners add a layer of indirection to the system.
