trendrr - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/trendrr en Copyright 2012 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:45:00 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.35-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Curatorr: A Twitter Tool for Media Companies curatorr_logo_feb09.pngLately, quite a few TV channels - like CNN - have replaced their man-on-the-street interviews with the cheaper solution of just doing a Twitter search and displaying the results on TV. Curatorr's mission is to help these media companies make the process of finding tweets to put on air even easier. Developed by Wiredset, the company behind Trendrr, Curatorr gives media companies, brands and publishers an easy way to find tweets and put the best of them on air.

]]> Curatorr offers a very streamlined workflow. First, you create a folder for your tweets. Then you perform a Twitter search and pick out the tweets you want to put into these folders. Curatorr offers a number of advanced search options that make it easy to filter tweets by sentiment and location, for example. From there, users can easily export the curated tweets as CSV files for further use and analysis. Curatorr also offers companies the ability to skin their Curatorr pages so that they can just put the actual site on air if they want to.

curatorr_sshot.jpg

One of the first broadcast companies to use this tool was MTV, which used the Curatorr platform to identify and publish tweets during the Hope for Haiti Concert.

For the time being, Wiredset will only offer Curatorr to on a limited basis and the company is mostly targeting TV networks and other media businesses. Pricing will depend on usage and scope.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/curatorr_a_twitter_tool_for_media_companies.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/curatorr_a_twitter_tool_for_media_companies.php Product Reviews Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:45:12 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Trendrr Makes Data Mashups A Breeze In our quest to provide comprehensive analysis of tech industry trends, most technology bloggers have become statistics junkies. To see what's popular we often rely on a bevy of metrics -- Google Trends, Technorati posts, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Compete stats, Facebook friends, etc. The list goes on and on. But comparing those statistics and trying to grok a trend isn't always an easy task. A new site called Trendrr is aiming to make that task easier by allowing users to manipulate a growing number of publicly available data sets.

]]> Trendrr currently offers up data from 17 different data sets -- and the site is always adding more. These are things like: stock charts, YouTube video plays, MySpace friends, comments, or profile views, Amazon sales rank, Google News mentions, etc. Users can also input custom data via the site's RESTful API or by hand. Users are allowed to track up to 20 data sets at a time.

Once Trendrr is tracking your data, it can then be mashed up into comparison graph. Data can be left absolute or scaled relatively, and the site supports line, area, bar, and scatter graphs. These charts can then be embedded, linked to, or exported via excel, xml, or json. Trendrr can also export data via its new simple graph syndication API.

For example, below is a chart I whipped up comparing the Amazon Sales Rank of the Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up" LP and the YouTube plays of the "rick roll" video. As much as I wish that meme would go away, it does look like it might be helping the man sell a few records.

My main gripe with Trendrr is that it doesn't always have historical access to data. That makes sense for some data sets -- it can't possibly have historical data for YouTube plays unless it was already tracking the video, and it can't possibly track every video on YouTube (at least, not without some serious resources). It does have historical data for some sources where it is available -- such as Google News mentions, but it is inexplicably missing historical data for others where it should be available -- such as stock quotes. As a result, for some data sets, tracking data won't show up for about 24 hours. My plan to offer a graph of Yahoo!'s stock price against Google News mentions was foiled because of the lack of historical data (3 days doesn't make a very compelling graph).

Conclusion

All in all, Trendrr is potentially a very useful site. It makes the task of visually comparing large data sets a breeze, and can handle the tracking of changing web data for you. The team also seems very well put together and dedicated to building out the Trendrr service -- since I came across it last week they added four new data sources and a syndication API (the schema for which was released under a creative commons license, by the way).

Trendrr also gets some serious humor points for their choice of default avatar. I once read that Flickr made their default avatar so bland and dull on purpose in an attempt to get people to change it to something more personal. Trendrr's default is... this guy:

If ol' Dick doesn't get you to immediately change your avatar, I don't know what will!

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/trendrr_makes_data_mashups_a_breeze.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/trendrr_makes_data_mashups_a_breeze.php Product Reviews Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:32:19 -0800 Josh Catone