Trend Spotting In Social Media
I came across two handy applications for tracking the popularity of terms mentioned in the blogosphere and social networks. These may come in handy for your research:
Facebook Lexicon — “Facebook Lexicon counts occurrences of words and phrases on Walls over time.” It can also compare two or more words in the same chart. You need a Facebook account to use it. Full explanation and link at the Facebook Blog. There’s some keyword kinks they need to work out, but it’s definitely helpful for any Facebook-related research.
Trendpedia — Similar to Lexicon, but Trendpedia pulls info from the blogosphere. Easy to use and a bit addictive! Here’s an example search comparing blog buzz between Twitter and Facebook over the past several months:
-Nate
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2 Comments, Comment or Ping
cvellis
Maybe I just refuse to believe that Facebook is a legitimate tool for communicating more than nonsense and jokes between friends, but I would venture to say most of my wall posts are not worthy of being included in any sort of lexicon. I think it would be interesting to see and compare the amount of worthwhile versus worthless wall content. The majority of Facebook users are still undergrads, right? So I would imagine that these aggregated wall words might include references to how drunk so and so was over the weekend and not much else.
Apr 24th, 2008
Corey
Since I think like an advertiser (because that is what I do), I can see these term tracking tools possibly being valuable for contextually relevant targeted avertising. The advertising on Facebook can already be highly targeted, but marketers may find even more value in this information in order to be even more relevant to their audience.
If these tools do get the attention of marketers, the challenge will be (to echo Chris) to decipher what is valuable and what is junk. As we all know, there is a lot of junk out there.
Apr 24th, 2008
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