Category Archives: News

Trendsmap Plus & Twitter Login Changes

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We have been busy with a number of changes to Trendsmap.com, as well as planning into the future. For those that want the short version of the changes:

  • Addition of Trendsmap Plus, subscription version of Trendsmap with much, much more information.
  • You need to now sign in via Twitter to get some information, including live tweets and some trend metadata.
  • Requiring business & heavy users of Trendsmap to use Trendsmap Plus.

There have been three primary factors driving these changes:

  • Changes to the way in which we get data from Twitter (Twitter API v1 to v1.1)
  • Ensuring the sustainability of Trendsmap.com into the future
  • The desire to expand the functionality, and insights offered through Trendsmap

Trendsmap Plus

Trendsmap Plus

Screenshot from Trendsmap Plus

From our information page :

Trendsmap Plus gives you up to 5 times more detail than Trendsmap.com, with faster updates and an enhanced interface that enables you to dive much deeper into news events as they unfold.

Trendsmap Plus has a greater range of the most relevant images, videos (also including vines and vimeo), news articles and people for trending events as they spread across a city, country, region or the entire world.

You can also monitor what people are saying about brands or industries, and quickly identify emerging opportunities for your marketing activities.

There is a lot of development happening with Trendsmap Plus, and we have a number of additional features we are hoping to make available here in the near future, including the ability to review Trends from the previous 24 hours.

Please note that we are now requiring business, commercial, or heavy users of Trendsmap to use Trendsmap Plus instead of the public site, which is primarily for personal use. You can find out more about Trensdmap Plus here.

Twitter Sign In Changes

Due to the changes Twitter have made to the way some data is provided, we are no longer able to provide the list of live, related tweets without an authenticated Twitter user. Previously, live tweets were able to be delivered directly to your browser, without the requirement of authentication. However now, signing in via your Twitter account gives you the same level of detail, as you would have had prior to this change.

About Trendsmap

Trendsmap.com has been developed in, and is run from Melbourne, Australia, by a small independent business running lot of big servers in America. Trendsmap.com ingests over 100 million tweets every day, and turns them into Trends for the whole world, in over a dozen different languages. We hope that the above changes, and the continued support from many thousands of people that use the site every day, from every corner of the world, will allow us to continue to provide this unique service well into the future.

Trendsmap Widgets

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Now you can have the Trendsmap experience on your public-facing website or blog, allowing you and your visitors to see at a glance the trends in your area of interest.

Trendsmap Widget Sample

You can now sign up from our products page.  A test embeding of a widget for London, UK can be found here.   More embedding options, and other forms of widgets are also in the works, so stay tuned for updates.

Changes!?

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Change is afoot!

For those who have noticed (and those who haven’t), we are making some changes to the Trendsmap site at the moment. There are more features, better interface and more in the pipeline!  There has already been some minor layout changes and some new information on our variety of products.

Some of you may have also noticed recently, that you can now log in with Twitter to interact directly with the tweets and users shown in Trendsmap.

More details to come!

More Languages, More Locations, Better Coverage and More Data

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It’s been a while between updates but we have have spent that time teaching Trendsmap five more languages and launched more than 240 new location pages.

New languages

Trendsmap can now natively process Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Italian, and Swedish tweets in addition to the existing ones of English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and Dutch.

This means we can now provide even more detailed and relevant trend information in areas where these languages are spoken.

We have already seen a big impact in the number of trending terms that Trendsmap displays  in the Middle East, Europe and Russia.

Trendsmap showing a number of countries with improved trends including Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

More Locations

We have also added 244 new locations with their very own local page across the globe, mainly in areas where our improved language coverage such as the Middle East, Russia, and parts of Europe.

In the Middle East a number of important cities have been added including recent news hotspots such as Damascus in Syria and Tripoli in Libya, as well as a number of smaller, previously unlisted cities in the region.

For a full list of the over 1300 local pages we now have, please see our Locations Page.

Better Coverage

We are now also doing more processing of data in areas where other languages are typically used.

This means that there is now a lot more hashtag and user trends in popular Twitter areas like South Korea and Japan.

This gives Trendsmap an even more detailed trend coverage across the globe than it has ever had.

More Data

Twitter has grown dramatically over recent years.

As such we have had to grow as well in terms of the volume of tweets we are processing.

Combine this growth with extra languages and additional data from a number of regions, we have gone from processing around 4 million tweets per day when we first started in 2009, to now processing over 60 million tweets per day from across the globe.

This means more trends, in more places as there are more tweets in areas where previously we wouldn’t have been able to extract a trend.

This increase has also allowed us to add in more locations, and we hope to continue to add more of these as possible.

April Fools 2011: Trending Links and Videos on Trendsmap

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If you happened to crawl out from under a rock on April 1st 2011…

…no one would blame you for thinking that Google’s Gmail can be controlled by movement, Youtube is 100 years old, or that IKEA have made a high chair for dogs.

As Trendsmap shows us the interwebs were so abuzz with rumors, jokes and pranks that I’m sure even veterans of the internet had to think twice before writing off some ‘news’ as bogus… It was a crazy news day!

So,  all in all, it was a good day to pretty much ignore the news completely, or from a PR perspective, maybe it was a good time to get some bad news out in the public sphere as it was likely that no one would believe you anyway!

@Scobleizer even asked of his followers:

If anyone has dirt on me can you blog it tonight? @TechCrunch has an article that seems serious but I can’t tell for sure because it’s 4-1.

As we watched April Fools day unfold on twitter (via Trendsmap.com!) we diligently went about collecting all the top links and videos that people were talking about…

Below are some of these! Enjoy.

Continue reading →

Trends that Matter – Follow Local Twitter Trends

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Over that past few months we have been creating Trendsmap Twitter alerts via localised Twitter accounts. The reason we’ve done this is that we realised early on that the trends that matter the most are those that actually mean something to you.

So with this in mind we decided that we needed to have the ability to alert our Trendsmap users to events and breaking stories that were happening ‘close to home’…

Introducing Trendsmap alerts via Localised Twitter Accounts!

As an example, I follow the TrendsAustralia Twitter account to keep up to date with what is happening on the Trendsmap Australia page. And I also follow the  TrendsMelbourne Twitter account to keep on top of local news and events.

You can do the same! (In about 5 seconds):

  1. Go to http://trendsmap.com/local
  2. Click on a Country or City link. I’m going to click on ‘United States‘.
  3. Then click on the ‘Follow on Twitter‘ link at the top right of the next screen.
     

  4. Done!

Below is a list of the Current top 10 City Twitter Accounts ranked by followers.

  1. Johannesburg : TrendsJoBurg
  2. Melbourne : TrendsMelbourne
  3. Cape Town : TrendsCapeTown
  4. Toronto : TrendsToronto
  5. Lima : TrendsLima
  6. Lagos : TrendsLagos
  7. Montreal : TrendsMontreal
  8. Madrid : TrendsMadrid
  9. Bogotã : TrendsBogota
  10. Buenos Aires : TrendsBA

** UPDATE **

The wonderful John Barratt has just made it even easier for you to follow your local Twitter trends.

You can still follow the steps above if you’re keen to discover and browse the actual content on Trendsmap as well as ‘follow’ on Twitter.

However, if you just want to go straight to a list of links to the various Twitter Accounts, then go here.

Happy Birthday to Us!

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Trendsmap is 1 year old today and we thought we’d use this joyous day to tell you about some of the things we’ve done recently.

Breaking Alerts

We have set up breaking alert Twitter accounts for over 100 locations around the world, with more coming soon. You can follow these to know what’s being discussed in your town right now, and some of the most popular ones include Melbourne, Toronto, Auckland, London, Johannesburg, Chicago and Mexico City. You can see the full list of accounts here.

Location pages

Our location pages (eg. New York), have a lot of detailed trending data for a city, and are often overlooked. We’ve spruced them up so you can more easily see:

  • Breaking trends
  • Trending links, videos and images
  • People and hashtags that are popular over the last 7 days

Our location pages are all listed here.

ABC Australian Election Trendsmap

We recently licensed a version of Trendsmap to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) for their coverage of the recent Australian election. We filtered purely on election based tweets, and had a timeline so trends could be viewed over time.

World Cup

We also created a version of Trendsmap for the World Cup, which proved a great way to follow the games. Below is one of the visualisations we created from it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5GVJHx0Cx0]

We’re continuing to work on new features, and if you’d like to give us feedback, please visit our UserVoice.

More than just English

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Ignoring the non-English speaking world online means missing out on a very large, and rapidly growing portion of the internet.  From the very first day we launched Trendsmap, the most common request we received was to track trends across the globe in languages other than English.  It has been a little while now since we have made a significant change to Trendsmap, but we are excited to be closing in on a new release which will be the first step in achieving greater internationalisation.

Recently we did a trial in conjunction with the National TV broadcaster in the Netherlands, NOS during the recent national municipal elections there.  Part of their election coverage including monitoring social media sites, including twitter, and in turn they used Trendsmap to identify local trends across the country during the election.  For this to work we had to include Dutch tweets in the trends extraction, the result being a specialised version that showed Dutch & English trends from the Netherlands.

As part of the next step we are looking at including Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese on Trendsmap.  Other languages would progressively follow thereafter.  Also included in this beta version are a number of other enhancements including better word placement, and enhanced resolution of the map (you will be able to zoom in a bit more).

Here are some screen shots giving a good indication of the change it makes when you use tweets from the ‘local’ languages to generate trends.

This first image is from the current site showing the Netherlands :

Main Trendsmap site showing The Netherlands, 15th of March 2010

This second one from our development version of the site shows the trends for the same region and time, but also using Dutch tweets to generate trends :

Beta Trendsmap site showing The Netherlands, 15th of March 2010

On a side note, if any geeky types out there happen to be heading to the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, WhereCamp in Mountain View, or Twitter’s Chirp Conference in San Francisco in the coming weeks, then please get in touch.  We are heading over from Australia, and will otherwise be in San Francisco for the period, and would love to meet up whilst there.

^JB

Welcome to the Trendsmap Blog

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Hello all you Trendsmappers.

We’ve a lot of exciting new things coming up so we thought we’d act like it’s 2006 and start a blog!

Firstly we wanted to share with you some of the fantastic coverage we’ve had since we launched way back in Sept 09:

You can stay tuned on the new features we’ll be rolling out here, but we’d totally love it if you can fan us on our new Facebook page. We’ve got 3 x $100 Threadless.com vouchers that we’re giving away. Just become a fan before 31st March to enter the draw.

Naturally you should follow us on twitter, and we’ve got some fancy visualisations on our youtube channel.

Stay trendy!