2009 was, without question, a great year for Twitter, the year that will be remembered as the year they "went mainstream" around the world. With one of the fastest-growing userbases in social networking, the future is bright for the microblogging platform. Just what that future is going to look like is fairly accurately reflected in the top Twitter trends of 2009 - because what those trends tell us about how people use Twitter and what the future has in store for the microblogging platform is a bit bleak.

With Twitter's new homepage redesign, the role of the trending topics has become even more significant; where previously, Twitter trends were only displayed in real-time, trending topics are now shown in terms of hourly, daily, and weekly trending topics. With the increasing significance of Twitter trends, questions of how Twitter regulates those trending topics is also gaining in significance. Should Twitter allow trending topics to run amok, or should they regulate them? Should Twitter discourage trend manipulation, only allowing organic trends to hit the homepage, or are manipulated...

Twitter trends are getting trickier and trickier. Last week we reported on 4chan's spamming of an NSFW hashtag onto Twitter's trending topics list. It's not the first time something inappropriate has ended up on the trending topics list. It seems like lately, Twitter is taking a more and more active role with removing topics they don't like from the trends list. The question, though, is whether the microblogging network needs to be doing more trend moderation, or less, and what form that moderation should take.

Trends come and go - that's the nature of them. One of the great things about Twitter is that they show on, on the homepage and accessible through the Twitter API, the top ten "trending" topics on Twitter. Sometimes the trending topics are hashtags, and sometimes they're just words that keep popping up over and over again in people's tweets. Oftentimes their meaning and significance isn't immediately obvious; by clicking at trending topic, you can view the stream of tweets containing that topic and try to figure out what it's all about.

WhatTheTrend clears all of that...