Our friends at Mashable, the largest independent news source dedicated to digital culture, social media and technology, have launched their mRank social buzz leader boards. mRank tracks posts on Twitter, Facebook and blogs to give an instant view on a topic in real time.

The PeopleBrowsr API was the key to mRank’s viability. Our API provides a comprehensive store of social data going back to 2008 and updates minute by minute. As Mashable put it, “Our partner, PeopleBrowsr, eats the Twitter firehose for breakfast, then moves on to Facebook for lunch, with a dinner made up of the blogosphere. PeopleBrowsr knows data.”

"When Mashable needed real time social analytics for our mRank social buzz leader board, we chose PeopleBrowsr because they have a deep repository of current social data that's indexed, filtered and ready to go," said Robyn Peterson, CTO, Mashable. "The PeopleBrowsr API gives us easy access to public Twitter, Facebook and Blog posts, which we can efficiently build our apps upon.

“The social web gives off the kind of data exhaust we can all use as tea leaves for the future, if we could only collect and understand it. This age has ushered in a true rise of data journalism: We all need to know the numbers, and try to understand them.”

We agree - and we developed the PeopleBrowsr API expressly to help organizations make sense of social data and find opportunities to learn and grow.

Mashable debuted its first mRank buzz board for the 2012 Oscars and posted a summary the next day, including a comparison to social media activity against the recent Grammys. At SXSW, mRank tracked buzz about start-ups to determine which were the breakout stars of the snow.

Visit Mashable throughout the year to see more mRank boards and examples of how the PeopleBrowsr API brings real time social data to life.