Chris just introduced me to TwitterFall

Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest ‘tweets’ of upcoming trends on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime.

Unlike other sites, Twitterfall purely does trends (for now). Because of this, we can be efficient – Twitter is queried from the Twitterfall server, and results are pushed to your browser, rather than your browser doing the queries, or your computer polling our server repeatedly.

Current trends include Digital Britain and the Superbowl, as well as the option of creating a custom trend, however:

These do not use the same method as the popular trends – which are pushed to you via the Twitterfall server to reduce load on Twitter. The custom trends directly query Twitter from your computer every 10 seconds.

With settings on landing page to help you control the speed of the data (from 0.3 per second up to an impressive, possibly headache inducing, 10 per second!) and the look of the page and from my play with it so far it seems to live up to the claims of extra efficiency with ease.

There are so many Twitter apps these days, (surely a sign Twitter’s made it!) it’s hard to keep track. Paul at Blending the Mix featured a list of the 100 most bookmarked web-based Twitter apps the other day, it’s slightly mind boggling to think how many apps there must actually be..! So, to all those people asking or predicting that 2009 is the year Twitter breaks/goes mainstream – hasn’t it already?