2 posts tagged “trend”
I do not know quite what to make of it, but people seem to have lost interest in online data. There is a consistent multi-year trend that shows a decline in online searches for "data". Interest is approaching half the level seen in 2004. At the same time, there has been a consistent increase in references to data in online news over the same period.
A similar, though more seasonal, trend is seen with the term "analysis": a decline in searches, but a steady increase in references in the news. And the formerly hot data analysis topic "datamining" has also seen a steady loss in interest in searches (and news).
My best hypothesis at the moment is that people are losing interest (or no longer need) to find primary information through data, and analysis, and datamining, and similar subjects because they are increasingly getting richer information fed to them through a media that increasingly uses "data" and "analysis" to support its reporting. A more pessimistic interpretation would be that people are increasingly less interested in, or capable of solving problems for themselves, and happy to be spoon fed. Take your pick.
Today, I present some important Web 2.0 trends. When I left to work at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan, not one of these were on the public radar. Now many dominate the mindshare of Internet users. Not being in the mix when these things came out was part of the price I paid for my time in New York.
I added Spock to the list because I believe that new search engine could have a profound impact on the Internet. They are forming an engine that could create a socially validated identify for people on the Internet, extracted and compiled from a wide range of social networks and self publishing websites. (Incidentally, they are hosting a Lunch 2.0 event tomorrow). Some of the Spock engineers are also Facebook developers as a natural extension of their work.
Facebook has been my focus since I have been back in Silicon Valley. I started the Facebook Application Development Meetup and associated group on Facebook. I started regular hackouts in which independent Facebook Developers get together to work alongside each other on their various applications, usually in a coffee shop. I also, of course, have been working on my own Facebook application.
Facebook is very important in the U.S., and is surprisingly dominant in Canada, and important in the U.K., and Australia.
Facebook does well in the English speaking world, but is poorly prepared to deal with the rest of the non-english world. Indeed, they did not even conceive of such obvious things as storing foreign postal codes. They refer only to U.S. zip codes, and store them as numeric values, so Canadian and British alphanumeric postal codes can not be collected or stored.
In this context, it is quite impressive that not one of Facebooks top cities is in the United States. The top cities are shown below.
The information in today's posting comes from Google Trends.
