Tag: lexicon
Facebook’s Lexicon – The Answer To Google Trends
by Andy on Aug.17, 2009, under Facebook
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?
