We've heard from lots of users that trending topics, as seen on the  
twitter.com homepage and on search.twitter.com, are a fun way to  
figure out what's going on in the Twitter-verse at this very instant.  
The one feature request that we've heard over and over, however, is  
"what's going on where I am?".  To answer that, we wanted to give you  
all a heads up regarding the new "Trends API" that we're launching.  
This API will open up trending information that is specific to a  
number of locations around the world.

At a high level, there will be two new endpoints:

* an endpoint to give a listing of all locations that trends are  
available for, and
* an endpoint to actually allow you to query by a specific location.

We're using Yahoo!'s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to name each location  
that we have information for -- we're doing so because those IDs give  
not only language-agnostic, but also permanent, stable, and unique  
identifiers for geographic locations.  For example, San Francisco has  
a permanent and unique WOEID of 2487956, London has 44418, and the  
Earth has WOEID 1.  You can find out more about those IDs at http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/
.  The EXAMPLES section at the bottom of the documentation's landing  
page shows an example of how to find out the WOEID of a specific place.

To start reading through the documentation, check out:

https://twitterapi.pbworks.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-trends-avai...
https://twitterapi.pbworks.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-trends-loca...

It should be noted that at launch, unlike the trends that are  
available by the search API, these localized trends will not be rolled  
up into daily and weekly trends.  Those rollups may come in a future  
release.

--
Raffi Krikorian
Twitter Platform Team
ra...@twitter.com | @raffi