>Facebook Lexicon
>Alexa is a great tool and I’ve seen it used many times to illustrate trends on the web – compare facebook.com against bbc.co.uk and it’s hard to deny the impact of social media on the web landscape.
Facebook has a similar service called Lexicon, which allows you to looks at “the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls”.
Here’s a comparison of the number of times Obama, Clinton and McCain were mentioned showing a clear spike around Super Tuesday on February 5th.
Trying comparisons in Lexicon is interesting, there is a regular peak every week when comparing party tonight and hangover, with about a 12 hour lag between the two.
Insights into Facebook can be inferred – try searching for less event related terms like news and there seems to be a regular drop in traffic on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Facebook seems to be a weekday site – no enormous surprise there.
Lexicon could also be extremely useful for marketeers who want to get a sense of buzz around a product. Comparing Xbox, Wii and PS3 together shows significant more interest in the Wii and an enormous buzz around the Christmas period.
Of course all this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt take into account the people who are creating these terms, their demographic, language and also geographic location – as a comparison of capital cities or a comparison of hello in different language demonstrates.
To make the circle complete, you can share your Lexicon comparison with friends or post it to your profile. There is a danger that this could create some horrible Facebook amplification feedback loop though, possibly leading to the end of the world. Or perhaps that’s reserved for Facebook chat.
Read MoreCloverfield – spoiler warning…
We went to see Cloverfield at a surprisingly quiet Brixton Ritzy on Friday night. It’s good and completely relentless – well worth seeing if you think you might like it.
I remember having a conversation with Dallas last July (ish) about a great trailer for a scary movie that nobody knew anything about. At the time it didn’t seem to even have a name, except possibly 1-18-08.
At the same time there were various online treasure hunt type games which teased and tempted you through various puzzles. Although looking back I think the information that was revealed about the film had little to do with what I saw on Friday night. The main hype and excitement seemed to just come from the trailer which managed to look terrifying but revealed pretty much zero about the film. On top of this we knew that JJ Abrams was involved, and whether you like Lost (note the phrase HD streaming on this page!) or not, you know he has a track record.
Now the film has been released, I thought it was be interesting to see how much content people have been posting about Cloverfield. You obviously might come across some spoilers if you visit the links below.
Flickr: 1420 photos.
This is the first photo which seems to refer to the movie uploaded on July 18 2007. There are also quite a few photos from the production sets.
Youtube: 6840 videos. These seem to consist of mainly trailers and exclusive bits of content leaked and a few people doing reviews and ranting about the movie.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufYF0f-zMgY&rel=1]
Facebook:You can join 19000 other people and become a fan of Cloverfield. Despite having such a huge number of fans, there are only 6 videos posted. There are over 1200 reviews and comments though, implying that people are not exactly rushing to Facebook to upload videos.
Blogs and elsewhere: There are a gazillion blog posts about Cloverfield, I think a more interesting analysis comes from Alexa and Technorati using both Cloverfield sites and 1-18-08 sites.
And from Technorati…
And if you have seen the movie and can take anymore, then you might be interested in following this link which possibly shows what happens after the lights came up… (or perhaps this is the sequel) http://www.1-18-08.com/
