Twitter is adding what could become a powerful new source for news.It is going to support location-based trends with a new application programming interface so that users can see what others nearby are tweeting about.

Twitter has indicated that its new “Trends API” will support queries for trends in a particular location.

Raffi Krikorian of Twitter’s Platform Team writes:

The one feature request that we’ve heard over and over, however, is “what’s going on where I am?” To answer that, we wanted to give you all a heads up regarding the new “Trends API” that we’re launching. This API will open up trending information that is specific to a number of locations around the world.

At a high level, there will be two new endpoints:

• an endpoint to give a listing of all locations that trends are

available for, and

• an endpoint to actually allow you to query by a specific location.

Twitter’s move to support location-based trends is sure to give developers an opportunity to further enhance existing mashups and applications that utilize Twitter’s API.

Find out more on Twitter’s API wiki here and here.