How hip are you? Are you on the cutting edge of what's being talked about by those in the know? You know, the "twitterati"? (Sorry, I just gagged a little there.) If you enjoy stock market-based games, and tracking the trending topics on Twitter, you might want to have a look at Pretweeting.

Pretweeting is a virtual stock market where the commodities that you buy and sell are trending words on Twitter. As words become more popular, they gain value, and as they become less popular, they fall. Now, I should make this clear: this is a virtual game, no real money trades hands.

When you sign in to Pretweeting using your Twitter account, you are given $5,000 virtual dollars. You can then choose to research the current price for trending words, and buy shares in them.

Unfortunately, like other "viral" games, by allowing Pretweeting access to your Twitter account, you are allowing Pretweeting to post tweets on your behalf, a practice that I'm personally not a fan of. For example, when you buy shares in a trending word, Pretweeting automatically posts a tweet to your account like the following when I purchased 500 shares of the word "minute" using my test Twitter account:

@pretweeting buy 500 minutes -> see price at http://pretweeting.com/w/minutes

Yuck, right?

It's too bad that an otherwise fun game is handcuffing itself by being a less than stellar netizen. (Wow, first twitterati, then netizen. I feel dirty.) I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to friends if it weren't for the spammy messages every time you do something in the game. There's a prominent "Like this game? Tell your friends!" link that auto populates a tweet for you to tell your friends about the game. That one's fine; it's up to the user whether they want to do it. But auto-spamming messages based on activities is just plain user abuse, and won't do Pretweeting any favors in the long haul.

Have you ever looked at the list of trending terms in Twitter and wondered what the heck "#momoams" (or some other esoteric term) means? What the Trend is out to try to solve that problem for you. In What the Trend you will find a list of all of the current trending topics in Twitter, typically with a one-sentence summary explaining why that topic is trending. Topics that have not yet been summarized are presented in a different color, and give you the opportunity to provide the first summary.

This functionality in and of itself is very useful, but What the Trend goes a step further, and allows you to click on a trending topic, bringing up a new page focused on that topic. The new page includes three columns, which include the latest tweets about the topic, latest news about the topic, and latest photos about the topic. It's a very quick and efficient way to drill down into the details of what has captured the hearts and minds of the users on Twitter.