Practically everyone watches trends. For some of us, watching trends can be a daily part of our job. For others, it may simply be fun to keep an eye on what's popular on the Web today. Many of you might be using Google Trends, but after reading this you might want to add Trendrr to your list of trend tracking tools.The basics of any trend-tracking tool applies to Trendrr. You enter one or more keywords and receive data about how each keyword is doing on the Web. However, one of Trendrr's key features is the amount of data presented. Trendrr provides you with graphs pulling data from sites as diverse as Technorati, Flickr, Google services, eBay, Twitter, & YouTube. However, we'd loved to see some data from services like Digg, FriendFeed, Delicious, and Diigo.
Trendrr also takes the data a step further by breaking down results from Google and Twitter. You can view how well your keyword is doing per hour, or per day, on Twitter. You can also view whether a keyword is getting more search engine hype than news or blog hype from Google Search, News, and Blog Search. Using the keyword "Grammy", I can see that there wasn't all that much hype in the days or hours before and after the Oscars on Twitter, but there were more mentions of "Grammy" than one might have expected during the Oscars:
On the other hand, news stories containing "Grammy" were on the up and up as seen in the following Yahoo and Google News graphs:
According to Google, blog posts featuring the word "Grammy" dropped significantly, while Technorati's data says otherwise:
So, what else can you do with all this data? You can annotate individual graphs if you sign up for Trendrr, compare and contrast different data sets, grab a graph's feed, and share your data in a variety of formats.
Google Trends & Trendrr
I wanted to compare Google Trends to Trendrr, but that's proven difficult to do. It's almost like comparing apples to oranges because the form of data available is different for both services. Google Trends provides only one graph and is focused on providing data about regions, and cities for keywords. Most of the data given is pulled from Google Search and News. Trendrr on the other hand is more about emphasizing how keywords are trending on social media services. I'd recommend using both tools in conjuction with one another.
All in all, Trendrr is a great trend tracking tool. However, one annoying quirk with the service is that you have to drag graphs to the "Scratchpad" in order to compare keywords unlike Google Trends where this is automatically done for you.
Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.