Google Trends for Websites is yet another traffic tracker for sites. It's in a field already dominated by Compete, Quantcast (for US traffic), and Alexa. So what could it possibly offer to users that we don't already have? This is Google we're talking about and Google has a significant amount of data about a ton of websites. For example, in our recent poll of Instant Messengers that ReadWriteWeb readers use here's how the websites IM clients Digsby, Trillian, Pidgin, Miranda IM, and Adium stack up against one another using Google Trends for Websites:

You'll receive a graph of traffic stats along with stats on the region of most visitors, related sites that visitors visited, and even other search terms if there are any. In contrast, Google Trends for keywords will show related searches, how popular the keyword is, peak time, news articles and blog posts mentioning the keyword.

The Little Guys Are Left In The Dust Again

If your blog or website doesn't receive a lot of traffic, you're better off sticking to trackers such as the Google Analytics service. Google Trends for Websites won't have any data for such sites, which is a shame considering the smaller bloggers may be the biggest users of the product. Personally, I don't see the use for Google Trends for Websites compared to other tools that are out there that offer the same information and more. Blogs already receive the information that Google is giving via their own statistics software with a lot more flexibility and options to choose from. In the end, Google Trends for Websites seems like a bit of a dud and the name should be changed to Google Trends for Popular Websites.

Below is Trendsspotting's image from our post, which neatly displays our picks:

Note that all the RWW authors contributed to the 10 Future Web Trends post, so they weren't just my ideas.

Trendsspotting came up with a tag cloud that combines the keywords from all of the 10 influencers:

It's very high level, but you can see that mobile, open, video, green, social, and networks are among the most popular tags.

Here is the full report, well worth a browse:

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

UPDATE: There is an newer version of this presentation here.

Trackur Trends

Unlike a larger service like Google Trends, for example, which only displays trends that are massive enough to cause a spike in overall search volume, Trackur Trends can regularly search for any keywords or phrase you choose, no matter how small or how rare it is that they are mentioned. You can also add filters to your search to help narrow down your results even further.

However, this new addition does not affect the price for the Trackur service - in fact, the price has now been lowered. The new pricing model actually makes it more affordable for everyone, but becomes especially appealing to the SMB market. Before, at $88/month, we wondered if Trackur did enough to make the service worth it, but today, Trackur's Standard service is available for only $18/month, so the answer to that earlier question is now "YES." (Note: the Enterprise version of the service changed to $188-197/month.)

If you're interested in using Trackur for your trend tracking needs, ReadWriteWeb has 5 free, 6-month Standard subscriptions to give away - just comment below with your information.

For the current epidemic in Mexico, though, Google obviously hasn't had time to validate its data against official data from Mexican authorities, but given the current interest in the topic, Google decided to go ahead and release this as an experimental product.

It would be interesting to see if Facebook could do something similar with Facebook Lexicon, though for now, Facebook only allows users to use this tool to perform relatively general queries.

Update: looks like Facebook actually posted some data about the swine flu today.

But Google Reader isn't the only web app that could use a feature like this. If we could pick any other Google service to provide an analysis of our habits, it would certainly be Gmail. But could it be that Trends for Gmail is already underway?

A recent post by Ed Kohler pointed us to a project under development for this very purpose. The project, called simply "Mail Trends," was mentioned on Mihai Parparita's personal blog back in March. (Parparita is a Google employee who had helped to build Google Reader itself.) Since Gmail doesn't have an official API, Mail Trends instead uses Gmail's IMAP support to pull the message headers and analyze them in order to extrapolate the data. Mail Trends can generate tables, graphs and distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, etc. You can see an example of what it can output here where Parparita ran it on a piece of the Enron Email Dataset.

The project, currently hosted at Google Code, offers the code available for download, but, unfortunately to run it over your own email, you have to do geeky programmer things like downloading something called Cheetah and mess around with a command prompt. There is not an executable file for either Mac or PC. (Lifehacker has a step-by-step guide to installation if you want to go this route, though).

We Need Mail Trends!

Outlook users already have an add-in called Xobni (our coverage) which provides a look at email trends among other things, so why not Gmail?

Although Mail Trends is clearly a personal project, we wonder if there's any chance of seeing it show up one day in Gmail's Labs section. Labs, the area under Gmail's Settings that introduces experimental features seems the ideal place to debut the trends technology...at least until it's perfected.

We contacted Parparita to see if there was any chance of that ever happening, but he never responded.

Here is an example of Lexicon:

...and a comparable trend map from Google Trends:

In announcing this new service, Facebook was careful to emphasize that no privacy violations have occured:

"We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, "juno") across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications."

Overall, it's good to see Facebook mining some of the vast data that they have - but not stepping on sensitive privacy toes while doing so.

Let us know your feedback / suggestions in the comments - I will continue to add to and tweak this presentation as these Web trends evolve. Alert readers will notice one new slide, page 9 about The Social Networking Arms Race.

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

The trends tab offers a drop down list of top ten trending topics (Chris Brown being the current most discussed topic), and the search box allows you to search in real time on any topic. Refresh your screen to see if you have the option yet, or take a look at our screen shots below.

Search for ReadWriteWeb:

The new search feature is something we've all been eagerly awaiting, especially since Twitter's announcement last month; clearly they've now "kicked the tires" enough and it's ready for the world.

Clicking on a trend leads to a page that includes news, blogs, and web searches in an attempt to explain why that search term might be as popular as it is. For example, today "bubonic plague" checks in at #70 because yesterday's news story about a capuchin monkey at the Denver Zoo dying of the disease. The results are, of course, not always perfect.

For example, this week's XM radio outage story takes up six different spots on today's Hot Trends list. It would probably be more useful if Google's algorithm attempted to group related searches into a single topic (or at least gave that option). Also, as Duncan Riley of Techcrunch points out, the very odd term"legless chihuahua" appeared in two spots on yesterday's trends list (though apparently spurred by a news story about, you guessed it, legless chihuahuas that made its way across the wires over the weekend).

Other oddities appear across today's list. The #14 search, for example, is "2004 world series champs" -- which, as an Ameican baseball fan like myself knows, is the Boston Red Sox, but the trends page for that term shows no recent news or blog posts that would have caused that specific search rather than the more common search for the team's actual name. Further, the searches appear to be coming out of Houston, Texas and Louisville, Kentucky, hardly bastions of Red Sox fandom. And why that would out rank #19 "whosarat.com" which was featured in a front page New York Times article this morning and widely reported across political blogs, is something of a mystery to me.

Google's Hot Trends is essentially like Yahoo!'s list of "Buzz Index Movers" which lists the day's top search gainers. Though Yahoo!'s list doesn't give as much information as Google's, it appears to have less peculiar listings upon first glance. That is perhaps because it is edited by humans. Strangely, there seems to be little overlap between the two lists.

Hot Trends could, of course, be very useful for Internet marketers and researchers studying how information flows and spreads across the web. It would be great if Google would offer API access to the service, especially with an expanded data set that included more frequent updates and a largest list of terms.

The search term "chihuahua puppies," of the legged variety, appear's on Yahoo's list of top decliners today, down 97%. Maybe Paris Hilton switched search engines overnight.

Starbucks, Chikfila and Ben and Jerry's are all doing election-day giveaways and apparently those are among Americans' top priorities. Let's keep that in mind when the press reports on record turnout!

Last month during the Presidential debates we wrote about the way that Google is changing political elections unlike anything else ever has. The ability to fact check, research in depth and learn more quickly about topics on the fly, during Presidential debates, is really world-changing.

Sometimes it's good to zoom out a bit, though, and remind ourselves on this huge day in history: what the people want is chicken, ice cream and coffee. You can see the full list of today's fastest rising search queries here.

With information from 404 travel sites including Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, and information on more than 150,000 hotels, Kayak trends offers a great snapshot into the demographics of a destination's most frequent visitors.

Says CTO Paul English, "People have conducted hundreds of millions of travel searches on KAYAK in the past year, generating a tremendous amount of data on travel demand trends. We're happy to make this information available to the travel press and to the general public."

Hard to believe, but corporate Web sites have been around for over 10 years now. It’s fascinating to see how they have evolved over the years, from the early days of magazine-style brochureware to the most recent trends of two-way Web interfaces.
Continue reading at Digital Web Magazine...

Twitter Censoring Trends: Is it Enough?

At the end of the day, we agree with Twitter's decision to pull the obviously forced hashtag from the trends section just as they did the last time a bunch of folks thought they would have some fun by tweeting other offensive words and phrases. But these incidents have made us wonder: has Twitter trends outlived its ability to function properly as an entirely algorithm-based service? Given how many people rely on Twitter trends to track hot topics and breaking news, the section will be under constant attack from those who want to use the algorithm for their own purposes...and not necessarily good ones.

In some cases, like the latest 4chan move, the term-made-trend will be a somewhat offensive, but ultimately harmless prank. In other cases, the trends will be courtesy of some marketer pushing their hashtag up through the ranks thanks to their latest "tweet-to-win" contest. But do either of these cases represent an organic news-based trend that deserves the spotlight? Perhaps not.

Although censorship isn't something that most people would normally support, in these cases it would feel less like censorship than it would a simple act of filtering. It's easy to see that "trends" like these aren't really the sort of trends that the section was meant to highlight. However, by letting the algorithm do all the work, everyone with an evil plan to get their hashtag into the leaderboard has a shot at 15 minutes of fame. And on the real-time web, that's an eternity.

If, on the other hand, Twitter started pre-filtering the trends for relevance, there would long be a reason for hoaxsters, pranksters, and other trend-hogging marketers to attempt to game the system. Just by putting a human editor in charge of Twitter trends, "fake trends" like these could easily be avoided. Even if the company didn't want to go with full-on censorship, they could at the very least move the "other" trends off the main page by adding a link that said "More..."

Filtered Trends Could Delay Breaking News

But the drawback to a human-filtered trends section could be a delay in seeing breaking news make trend status - and that would be a disaster for a service that's all about immediacy. For some people, even the threat of a delay such as this would probably have them saying, "forget censorship and filtering - I want real-time trends, legit or not!"

But to those people, we ask: what about when Twitter becomes so uber-popular that the real-time trends section you crave becomes filled with junk trends thanks to internet memes and marketers' messages? Will you still prefer it then?

We're not sure if a human editor is the right solution for Twitter, but one day soon, something will have to be done. One commenter on a previous post mentioned some other ideas for filtering trends and hashtag spam, including having users tweet "#spam=hashtag" and suggesting Twitter adds a feature which would let us block hashtags from our streams. Another commenter suggested Outlook-like rules for hiding certain hashtags. If you have any ideas of your own about what Twitter should do, feel free to share them in the comments.

'Web 3.0,' however, seems to have peaked as a term to describe the next wave of Internet innovation before it even had a chance to happen.

For a the full list of Web 2.0 buzzwords, head over to the Royal Pingdom blog.

Conclusions?

We wouldn't want to draw too many conclusions from this list, as it is based on search terms, and as users get more familiar with these and start bookmarking their favorite sites, they will probably start using search less. Also, as these terms become household names, fewer users will look them up on Google.

In some ways then, we might be able to interpret the decline of searches for 'RSS' or 'cloud computing' as a positive thing, as users have replaced searches for these general terms with more specific queries.