Andy Cook Tell 'Em

Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and phrases posted on Facebook Walls. It has a surprisingly useful interface, with a scroll bar enabling you to zoom in and out to get different views of the trend line. You can compare up to 5 different trends by separating words/phrases with a comma.

Although Lexicon compares favorably to Google Trends, it has some flaws. It only allows single words or words with dashes, and no support for any non-alphanumeric character. Also, to compare apples to apples, Google Trends has a wider range of data – including breakdowns by region, city and language.

Here is an example of Lexicon:

Due some some privacy concerns, Facebook announced in the blog regarding the release the quote,

“We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, “juno”) across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications.”

So this looks fairly useful and has the potential to overtake Google Trends due to the extremely personal and accurate measure of each term.  Will more features come soon? I hope they will release a sorting method to only include certain networks or groups of friends, but they may never happen.

What are you thoughts?

New sources have discovered that the DDoS attacks yesterday on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Blogger, and Google have discovered that the attacks were aimed to silence one man. Who is this man? He’s a blogger from the Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu. Why would anyone want to silence this specific man? He was blogging about the current conflict between Georgia and Russia. This is the first known simultaneous attack ever on multiple social networking websites.

CNet is quoted as saying,

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Every site had significant downtime except for Google, their response was,

“We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”

All in all, this is an interesting development in the progression of how people want to censor or silence people blogging about political activism.  Similarly to the #iranelection hashtag, this DDoS attack against multiple personal media outlets shows the influence people can have over huge political movements.

Will social networking really change the way the world works?  I definately think so and I believe these developments prove the point.

I just heard about an interesting, yet very useful feature you can use from the Google Chrome Omnibar. You can Tweet just as easily as search or typing in a URL. This takes about a minute to set up and can be very useful in Tweeting in a hurry!

Here’s how to do it:

1. Add a new search engine – Click the settings button (the wrench) then click options.
2. Click manage next to default search engine.
3. Add a new search engine using the following url:

http://twitter.com/?status=%s

4. Name it Twitter, then for the nickname choose something easy to remember such as “tweet”
5. To tweet, simply then type into the omnibar “tweet Testing out tweeting from the Chrome Omnibar!”‘

So check it out and enjoy tweeting from the Google Chrome Omnibar!