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trends posts

Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging

Twitter plans to cut the noise out of trending topics ... but how?

Have you ever actually clicked on any of Twitter's trending topics? I don't want to sound like the old guy telling whippersnappers to get off his lawn, but trying to read almost any Twitter trend gives me a headache. There's so much spam with popular hashtags attached that even people who care about the trends aren't getting a great user experience. Twitter realizes this, and they're going to do something to cut down the noise.

The precise something that Twitter intends to do isn't really clear. Biz Stone's blog post is full of ambiguous language: "We're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful." It's not clear whether this means manually filtering trends in some way, or whether Twitter is introducing an algorithm to weight tweets by relevance. I think the average Twitter user is less concerned with the technical details, and more concerned with how effective this experiment will be at reducing junk tweets.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Digg's homepage will display trending stories for user voting

How can a Digg story make the front page without making the front page? Digg is about to show you, by placing some highly-active stories on the homepage for 10 minutes at a time before they have enough diggs to be there. By putting these trending stories up front, Digg intends to have a higher volume of users digg or bury them, as a sort of filter to decide what belongs on that coveted high-traffic front page.

"Activity," in terms of getting a story to trend, doesn't just mean diggs. It also means comments, favorites and shares. Because these trends will be gone in 10 minutes if they don't survive the voting process, Digg has started a Twitter account to announce new trends and give more users a change to vote on them. Stories will only show basic information, to cut down on bias in the voting.

Let's have a little vote of our own: do you think putting Digg trends on the homepage is a good idea?


Is putting trending stories on the Digg front page for user voting a good idea?

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Microblogging

Trendsmap mixes Twitter Trends and Google Maps

Twitter Trends, whether you find them useful or not, are a rich and interesting set of data to work with. The problem is that you can't narrow it down much: trend data comes Twitter users around the world, with no way to filter by region. Trendsmap combines Twitter Trends with Google Maps to add that ability.

You can zoom in and out on the map to narrow your view of trends to the area you're interested in. Clicking on an individual trend gives you more info, including how often people are tweeting about the trend, and additional links and media that might explain why it's popular. Trendsmap even pulls information on each topic from the Twitter Trend explanation site What The Trend.

[via Mashable]

Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Tweetmixx helps you see what's hot on Twitter

As Twitter becomes more popular, it's become increasingly difficult to stay on top of links, content and stuff you're friends and followers are sharing. Made from the same guys behing Mixx, a Digg-style website that features user submitted content that you can vote on, Tweetmixx is designed to make it much easier to share and view links and content found in tweets.

After logging in with your Twitter username and password, you'll immediately be presented with a cool list of links found in your friends' tweets. See comments on them, view hot trends and even post and share directly from Tweetmixx. You can even specify interests that will help filter stuff you're interested in seeing.

Filed under: web 2.0, Microblogging

Trendsmap is a slick Google Maps - Twitter trends hybrid


While it won't give you any local insight if you happen to be from just about anywhere in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or the Dakotas, Trendsmap is a slick, visual way to see what people are buzzing about on Twitter.

This isn't just another boring Twitter-Google mashup, though. It's got some added explorational sizzle. Click on any of the tags, and the introduction window you see in the screenshot will change to a topical display. The box contains not only relevant updates, but also displays the tag's 7-day local and global popularity, images and videos which have been mentioned, and popular topical links (see inset).

Trendsmap's toolbar is minimal and includes only five quick-access items: zoom in and out, snap to your city, snap to your region, and show the globe. I'll go out on a limb and say that the snap buttons will work for those of you in more cosmopolitan areas.

Read more →

Filed under: Internet, Features, Blogging, iPhone

Regator comes to iPhone

Blogs are a dime-a-dozen these days. There's no shortage of sites dedicated to posting articles on just about anything you could possibly be interested in. Regator.com, a website dedicated to sifting through the countless blogs on the internet has finally released their own companion iPhone application.

If you're not familiar with Regator, it's a great web resource that highlights the web's best posts from the web's best blogs. It acts as a news aggregator breaking down blog sites into categories and offering a fun way to discover content on the internet. The new application, Regator for iPhone [iTunes Link] promises much of the same thing with a slick and easy to use interface and some great features.

So what makes Regator for iPhone so great? It's the only mobile application that allows users to browse, search, share and read thousands of the web's best blogs. It might sound a lot like an RSS reader, but it's so much more than that. By collecting, sorting and providing readers with thousands of articles, it's an easy source for news on almost any subject.

A few shots of Regator in action:

Gallery: Regator

  • Popular articles
  • Topics
  • Discover posts
  • Sharing
  • Trends

Read more →

Filed under: Web

SnapStream's TV Trends is like Google Trends for TV

SnapStream TV Trends
SnapStream Media has launched a new tool called TV Trends that lets you track how frequently a word or term is mentioned on major US television channels. SnapStream is the company behind the BeyondTV personal video recorder software and the ill-fated Couchville web-based program guide.

The company also offers an enterprise package called Snapstream Server which can record up to 10 channels at a time, and store up to 9,000 hours of programming. It also captures data like closed captioning. So it's not surprising that Snapstream is recording thousands of hours of TV at a time and is able to process the data to look for keywords.

TV Trends doesn't promise to capture every single mention of a term on television. But Snapstream is tracking all of the major broadcast networks in the US as well we cable news networks.

You can track a single term or multiple search terms. And you can filter results by genres, TV networks, or term periods. You can also embed the charts on any web page. Sure, TV Trends is probably just a promotional tool to get people to notice Snapstream's commercial PVR products. But it's also a pretty nifty way to get a handle on what people are talking about on TV.

[via SnapStream Blog

Filed under: Search, web 2.0

Scoopler: real-time search results and more


As developers look at the success of Twitter and the possibilities of real-time, search results that come straight from social networks, we're going to start seeing a lot more search engines like Scoopler. Scoopler delivers search trends in the left column, scrolling search results from Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and Digg in the center, and video, links and images on the right.

Scoopler's not going to replace Google any time soon, but it's also not designed to. It probably can replace Google for you in those cases where you really need up-to-the-minute information, the kind that people will be Twittering about before it shows up on news sites. Twitter Search is obviously great for this, too, but Scoopler gives you more sources and updates in real-time. It's definitely worth checking out if you're a web trends junkie.

Filed under: Business, News

Newssift: business-oriented news trend browser

Newssift is a way to gauge the media buzz around various business topics, companies and people. It analyzes qualitative data from a whole bunch of news sources, and lets you browse stories on a subject and see if the overall media vibe is positive or negative. It strikes me as a sort of Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes for the business world.

Newssift has a search feature, and also a list of popular topics to browse from the front page. You can combine more than one topic into a single search, and save searches if you want to keep up to date on them. Newssift also shows a breakdown of the sources on a specific topic, so you know how many stories are coming from newspapers, TV or blogs. I'm not in the financial field, so I'm not sure how useful a tool Newssift is, but it's definitely an interesting experiment.

Filed under: Fun

Name your kid something trendy with nametrends.net

If you're a hip and with-it parent-to-be, or just someone who's thinking about getting a dog, you can stop by nametrends.net. Nametrends shows you what the most popular names are, and which ones are moving up and down on the trendiness scale. Want to be original? Don't name your son "Jayden" or your daughter "Addison." Those are so hot right now.

The data on Nametrends is actually impressively deep. Popularity charts go back to 1880, and you can also search by geographic location and similar sounds. You can look up your own name, and check out maps that show its regional popularity over time, or even check out categories as esoteric as "gems." Even if you don't have anyone or anything to name, it's a fun time waster.

Filed under: Internet, News

The Really Slow Download Squad: 62% of dialup users don't want high-speed

As you might guess from the name of our blog, we download a LOT of software, and it's a little scary to contemplate how much bandwidth we collectively use every day. So, trying to imagine a time when we felt like a dial-up connection would suit our needs is pretty difficult. But that's exactly how 62% of U.S. dialup users feel, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life project.

The economy isn't doing so hot these days, so you'd think that the additional cost of a high-speed connection would be the deciding factor for these folks, but it turns out that only a third of them cited cost as their reason for sticking with dial-up. 19% gave the mystifying answer that nothing -- not even a huge decrease in the cost -- would make them give up their dial-up. The study posited that they just don't spend enough time online to need it.

[via Slashdot]

Filed under: Design, Fun, Internet, Social Software, Beta, web 2.0

Track trends with p0pulist

Does coolhunting have to be done by a handful of trendsetters and influencers, or can it be crowdsourced? p0pulist is one site that's betting on the wisdom of crowds to turn up the next big thing. Sign up for an account, tell p0pulist what you like, and check out what others are saying to build your own personal coolhunting directory.

What interests us about p0pulist is the different directions it could take. The site has been covered by the bleeding-edge trend-watching site JoshSpear.com, focusing on its potential to call attention to exciting new products; it's also been covered by web 2.0 news site Profy.com, who pointed to the potential for a FriendFeed-like conversation to take place on p0pulist.

We also like it for the pretty interface, the Facebook integration, and the mobile posting feature. p0pulist is on the right track by eliminating as many barriers to entry as possible, and designing a site that would be really easy to start using habitually. Whether you're a trend junkie or a devourer of all things social on the web, p0pulist looks like a good place to jump in early.

Filed under: Fun, Internet, E-mail, Productivity, Google, Freeware, web 2.0

Mail Trends: what's your email look like on a graph?

Mail Trends
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]

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, web 2.0

Trendrr - compare and share social data


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.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

Can the internet predict the Democratic nominee for President?

Decisions, decisions.

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.

Read more →

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