Trends are among the most useful features of Twitter as they offer you a fairly good idea of what people are talking about in the online world. Twitter offers global trends or you can also switch to local trends that show the hottest topics from a particular city or country.

If enough people talk about a news story or even a product, it becomes a trending topic on Twitter and that drives even more attention to that product. No wonder, brands are trying all sorts of “innovative” ways - from organizing quizes on Twitter to offering freebies for retweets - to get their #hashtags on to Twitter trends. And it seems to be working for them as well. At the time of writing time, the Trending Topics for Delhi had at least 3 hashtags have been artificially pushed to the list.

Here’s a little secret you may not know. Twitter, by default, shows 10 trending topics on their website for a specific location and you do not have an option to disable these hashtags based trends. However, if you request the same trending data through the Twitter API, you can choose to exclude hashtags and other promoted trends and have a more “organic” list of trending topics.

The other challenge is exploring Twitter trends. Like most other Twitter users, I click on a trending topic to read the most popular tweets around that topic and repeat this for the trending topic. That takes both effort and time.

My latest project, Trending Topics, offers a slightly different view of top 10 Twitter trends that is also easier to explore. Here you can see all the trending topics of any location on one page and also the most popular tweets for that topic.

There are no hashtags or promoted trends in the list and this data is available for all 415 places for which Twitter provides trending data. Here are sample pages for Delhi and San Francisco.

Give it a spin and please do share you feedback on how we can further improve the list.