First, there was the stock market, then fantasy league games, and now there’s a prediction market for Twitter. If you love playing virtual games wherein your predictions of what’s trending are the key to winning, then you’ll love PreTweeting.com.

It’s a virtual predictive stock market for Twitter trends focused on words that will be used more or less often, assigning them a dollar value (virtual dollars, no real money is used) according to their popularity on the Twitter stream. Some words are precluded, of course, such as “and” and “the” and the like, with words like “morning” and “Congress” getting fairly high billing as of this writing.

The setup is pretty simple. Signing in using your Twitter account, you can “buy” shares in words that you predict will rise in value as they are used more often. When their value does go up (or begins to drop), you can sell them off to reap the rewards or losses.

Right now, there are enough active Twitter users that someone buying a specific word and then using it in several tweets a day won’t affect the market much, so the game is relatively balanced, making it more fun.

The only problem with this game, really, is the lack of control you have to submit to in regards to your Twitter account. While the game doesn’t spam or send endless ads for itself, it does force tweets through yoru account whenever you buy or sell shares in a word. That is kind of annoying sometimes.

Using the #pretweeting hash, though, you can chat with other PreTweeting users and even form little ad hoc unions to boost values on some words by having word parties where you tweet a specific word at a certain time on a set day.

On the whole, Pretweeting is a fun game and has a lot of potential and can be a great distraction from the day. It’s not the kind of game you get sucked into and spend your life playing and those who do aren’t necessarily better off than casual players are. This makes for a laid-back, fun environment that can be very entertaining.