Today we are launching support for a new social network, Bluesky. Bluesky was spun out of Twitter/X a while back, but is now a social network in it’s own right, with up to 30k posts per hour. Both Mastodon and Bluesky are currently supported on TrendBowl in 10 languages, which can be selected by a dropdown box. There are now a number of Twitter/X competitors: Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads by Meta.

So two weeks ago Twitter turned off my API access again, see my two posts previously about that. One way or the other, I have decided to drop them from the site permanently. This includes removal of the Twitter page from the Android app, which should be in the next update of the app.

Today we announce the launch of our Android app on the Google Play and Amazon App stores. The app offers the same functionality as our web site, but is better taylored to mobile devices. An iOS app is still in the making.

So apparently the Twitter system somehow reinstated my API access. I noticed this, because I had a dev environment still up which suddenly resumed displaying Twitter trends. So I have reverted the deletion of the Twitter tab for now and you can see trends on Twitter again.

So, Twitter dumped us! (not us dumping them…) The Twitter API v1.1 no longer allows using Twitter trends data and has shut down our access a week ago. The new v2 API does not provide trends data, unfortunately. So effective today we have removed the Twitter tab from our main page. Too bad.

Starting today TrendBowl will display trends found on the federated social network Mastodon, which is seen as the main Twitter competitor right now. While Twitter publishes trends on their API, which TrendBowl simply picks up, Mastodon requires more effort. Similarly to our treatment of Reddit, data is picked up in large amounts from Mastodon, and TrendBowl then runs trend detection algorithms of our own on this data in order to detect trending entities.