ItsTrending is a new website that shows popular shared items on Facebook. This isn’t anything magical – Matt Schlicht, a product manager at Ustream, put it together in an evening – “This is a good example of how easy the Facebook plugins are to implement – I’m a product guy not a developer,” says Matt.
But it is a new view into popular links some people may find fascinating, and I’m a sucker for simple mashups. It shows the most shared links on Facebook for a variety of third party sites – news, video, pictures, etc.. It uses the Recommendations social plugin provided by Facebook (like I said, no coding magic is going on here). But the data is great, and like Digg, TweetMeme and other services, it helps people find interesting and relevant content. And given that AllTop and PopUrls still survive, why not ItsTrending, too.
Mostly though what ItsTrending shows is the power of all this data that Facebook is collecting, and how it can be used in very productive ways as it’s released to third parties.