Foursquare begets Swarm, a mobile app that enables users to keep up and meet up with their connected friends. The check-in experience is largely the same, but new passive tracking allows for Neighborhood Sharing — which you can enable or disable with a swipe. Techcrunch describes the larger trend represented by Swarm and other invisible apps, …
Visualizing Crimea interest online
Lots of thoughtful coverage of today’s significant events in Crimea at major outlets like The Guardian, CNN, and Politico, as well as through crowdsourced efforts to amplify local opinion, like Global Voices. Two quick snapshots of escalating web interest below. Google searches for Crimea over the past year: Twitter mentions of Crimea and Sochi over the past month:
Friday 5 — 1.24.2014
Google knowledge graph, which seeks to represent “real world things and their connections,” surfaces the relevant content you see on Google search results pages, like movie times. This week Google added to their results a short description of websites that are “widely recognized as notable online, when there is enough information to show.” There’s a lot of content …
When does Sherlock start again?
Want a clunky way to figure out when the next season of Sherlock starts? Check out Google search trends for Benedict Cumberbatch.
Search interest: Arsenal vs. Manchester Utd
Highly unscientific, correlation is not causation, etc., but fun to see search interest in Arsenal FC rising and predicted to rise more as they finished 2013 at the top of the Premier League.
Where’s my stuff?
The trend of staying home and spending made for a strong online shopping season. Amazon recorded roughly 426 orders per second on Cyber Monday, and overall online sales were up 21% over 2012. Good news for some retailers, but the high volume combined with bad weather and a shorter than usual holiday shopping season to …
Friday 5 — 12.6.2013
Google Trends is a handy, visual tool for comparing topics by their relative search volume — see graph of search trends for Hong Kong and Singapore above. This latest release uses its vast historical data to offer dotted-line predictions of future search interest. Another useful feature: the algorithms now aggregate different searches likely to be …
Try it: Google define
Language is always changing, but the arrival of consumer technology over the past 25 years has meant a sharp uptick in our new day-to-day jargon. Terms like modem, pager, or smartphone enter and exit the common usage with remarkable frequency. FlowingData this week pointed out how Google’s “define: <word>” feature now displays word etymology via …
Friday 5 — 08.09.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Anyone who has ever clicked on a search result only to land on an article stub generated by a content farm will be glad to see this latest Google tweak. This update highlights up to three in-depth articles in the right column, pointing users …
Try it: Visualize search worldwide
Add another curiously mesmerizing big data visualization to your procrastination list. This colorful visualization serves up a (presumably filtered for a G rating) constantly-updating view of all the Google search terms people in the U.S. are entering in near real-time. For fun, toggle over to see search terms in ten other countries, including Australia, India, and Russia. Feature request: a customized version …