Google Trends does a good job and there is a roundabout way of programmatically getting that data. Twitter has trends but needs location to work. I was wondering if there are any APIs that can surface this information? Ideally looking at a 24 hour day, useful to have trends based on keywords, facebook trends and twitter hashtags
I only know topsy.com, never used their api but they're twitter's only valid partner on trends and stats etc. http://about.topsy.com/support/api/ i hope it helps.
Yeah, I second TrendSpottr. They not only have an API for surfacing trends for any topic or keyword but also an API for trending alerts. http://trendspottr.com/api. I also use their trends dashboard Signal http://trendspottr.com/signal.