Ever wonder what your email behavior looks like on a graph? Because if you have, we've good news for some of you -- well, those of you that use Gmail. Google coder Mihai Parparita just released a Python program called Mail Trends, which can show you various graphs of data extracted from your email account. You can examine your email behavior from various angles:

• Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day
• Distribution of messages by size and your top 40 largest messages
• The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you're on.
• Distributions of senders, recipients and mailing lists over time
• The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads

If you don't use Gmail, fear not. The plan is to eventually release a version that works with other email services, though it is unknown when that version will see the light of day.

[via Googlified]

There are plenty of comparison tools for site traffic. Given a few minutes, we're willing to bet our readers could create a graph of a site's popularity over time. But what about graphing an artist's plays on MySpace or YouTube, how often people write blog posts about each presidential candidate, or how many people are seeding a file on BitTorrent? Trendrr lets you graph, compare, and mash up this kind of data with ease.

Trendrr makes graphing simple by including a drag-and-drop scratchpad that lets you edit and compare graphs with a minumum of effort. The system is based on the RESTful api, which means advanced users can hack together their own trends - there's an example on the site of graphing your computer's CPU usage over time. For everyone else, though, the list of built-in data sources includes popular sites like eBay and YouTube. Don't miss the gallery of popular graphs, which are sometimes informative and sometimes just funny.

Presidential elections are tough. It's a long process fraught with uncertainty, pitfalls and heartbreak; just ask Ross Perot. In this last push towards the Democratic convention, and with a race that many are saying is too close to call, we figured it was perfect time to put some crowdsourcing to work and see how accurate it might be.

So, what do the Interwebs tell us about Tuesday's primary to end all primaries? Frankly, a lot. The first place we decided to hit on our prognostication panoply pursuit was prediction purveyor Intrade.

While Yahoo! fields merger/hostile takeover offers, the company's development team continues to push out new services. Today Yahoo! launched a retooled version of its video site. And Valleywag is reporting that the company will be launching a brand spanking new service on February 26th: A news and entertainment page featuring popular stories from around the web.

Yahoo! Buzz as it will reportedly be known will be something of a cross between Digg and Google Trends. Top stories will be chosen through a combination of user votes and popular search results.

But Digg has one thing that Yahoo! Buzz won't. At least not immediately. And that's a list of links from an unlimited number of web pages. Yahoo! Buzz will only feature links to about 100 web publishers at first. Eventually the company will reportedly open Buzz up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, which means that anyone who sells Yahoo! ads on their site could be featured on Yahoo! Buzz.

While that might sound like a good reason for people to sign up for the publisher network, as incentive to get more social networking traffic, it also means that Yahoo! Buzz is by definition going to be more limited than Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social news and bookmarking sites. But this is all rumor and speculation at this point. It's possible Yahoo! Buzz won't be as limited as Valleywag suggests. Or maybe it's not even real.

If you go to buzz.yahoo.com today you'll find a page with top search results trends. But if Valleywag is correct, that site will be the future home of Yahoo! Buzz.

If you're one of those people worried that one day Google will own all of your personal data, you'd better sit down. Google has launched a new service called Google Checkout Trends that shows what people are buying from merchants using Google Checkout.

Now, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. Google is anonymizing the data before releasing it. So there's no way you can use this tool to find out what Steve from the office bought his wife for their anniversary. Not yet anyway. But you can get a picture of what items are popular over time, and how two items compare with one another. For example, you can search for "ipod, zune" to see which item sold better last month.

Or at least that's how it works in theory. Right now the service seems to be down. Ionut Alex Chitu at Google Operating System grabbed a screenshot of the service last night showing that it must have worked at some point. But even Google's suggested searches return no results right now. Let us know if you have any better results in the comments.

[via Official Google Checkout Blog]

There's a neat little trick that lets you see how many people are subscribing to a site's RSS feed in Google Reader.

All you have to do is fire up Google Reader, click the "Add Subscription" button and type a web site name or keyword. Google Reader will spit out a list of blogs and news sites along with the number of users who have subscribed to that site using Google Reader.

These numbers are only kind of useful. After all, Google Reader is just one of hundreds of RSS readers. And only a small percentage of web users actually subscribe to RSS feeds. But Google Reader is probably one of the more popular readers out there, and this data provides yet another way for people to argue about which web sites are more popular than others.

For the record, Download Squad has over 9,000 subscribers according to Google Reader. This represents a fraction (although not an insignificant one) of the overall number of people who subscribe to our RSS feed. But then, since we're a technology-oriented blog, a higher percentage of our audience knows about and uses RSS feeds than audiences for many other sites.

Flickr has seen incredible progress since its inception only three short years ago, and IDG News Service sat down with co-founder and general manager Stewart Butterfield to talk about the website's growth and history, and future plans.

The photo sharing service has never strayed too far from its original purpose, even after entering the Yahoo! fold and through its explosion in popularity, with 7.2 million registered users and 23 million monthly unique visitors. Nevertheless, Butterfield chimes in with some thoughts on what we might expect (or not expect) down the line, including possibilities of news components, photo syndication opportunities, competition, and other relevant bits. But, I think the real question remains: when will Flickr transcend the Gamma phase?

Google made a number of big(ish) announcements at yesterday's Google Press Day, but isn't that what Press Day is for? The biggest, or at least most fun, announcement was Google Trends, a new project at Google Labs that gives you pretty Alexa-like charts of search activity and Google News articles for the keywords you punch in. The charts are reminiscent of Google Finance, with news articles marked to correspond to points on the chart. By separating them with commas you can specify up to five different keywords to show on the same chart.

Last week I insinuated that Google Health might be among the news, but that was a little off. What Google did launch is Google Co-op, which is two things: First of all, it's a sort of tagging system that allows Google to create "vertical" search engines on specialized topics, e.g. Health. This works by allowing experts and professionals to "label" (i.e. tag) a bunch of URLs and upload them en masse. The tagging end of the equation isn't aimed at end users a la Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (yet), but the results are. Second, Google Co-op does something called "Subscribed Links," which basically allows third parties to create modules that will pop up for relevant searches, much in the way that, say, links to Google Maps currently pop up when you search for something that looks like a location. Currently there aren't very many Subscribed Links available, but they do show what's possible. The Digg subscription, for example, shows you recent popular posts related to your query on Digg along with how many diggs they've gotten. The Fandango subscription shows you movie information and links to tickets and showtimes for movie title queries. I can imagine this becoming really useful.

Google also announced the Beta release of Google Desktop 4. The biggest new feature is the inclusion of Google Gadgets, i.e. widgets. I won't go into too much detail here since widgets are all but ubiquitous these days (see Apple's Dashboard and the Yahoo! Widget Engine). Instead, take a loot at the Gadget library to see what's available. Of course, there's an open API for creating your own, and you can even import some Gadgets from your Personalized Home to Google Desktop 4, and Google will recommend Gadgets for you based on frequent searches.

Lastly, Google is being a little quiet about the last of its announcements, Google Notebook. It's described as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others," but that's about all we know. They could take this in a number of idrections, but it sounds to me a bit like the ScrapBook extension for Firefox, though I'm sure it will have a significant web-based component. Look for Google Notebook to launch next week at Google Labs.