There has been a lot of seed projects to aggregate the hot topics of Twitter in one place. Tweetmeme is breaking through as the most reliable provider of such a service. Tweetmeme is a service built by fav.or.it, the first integrated solution to allow blogging experts and non-technical people unlimited access to the worldwide blogosphere. Tweetmeme is the first project of fav.or.it focused on the Twitterverse.
Tweetmeme monitors, aggregates and organizes discussions by order of popularity, the same way Techmeme does for tech news. Once on the homepage, the latest hot topics are displayed. Visitors can view past hot topics by changing the search date. Feedopaths can grab the feed to track the activity from their feed reader.
I couldn’t find any specific information on what the dev team defines as a hot topic. It seems from the information presented that the number of times an item has been retweeted acts as a main factor in the algorithm that defines the popularity of a tweet. It doesn’t say if they measure tweeters’ reputation, popularity, or if they measure the popularity of the link attached to a specific tweet…
Whichever the algorithmic scenario, the service is experiencing a growing popularity in the bloggers and online PR sphere, so it’s worth taking a look at it, and maybe play with the feed in Yahoo Pipes.