Googlified

Mihai Parparita, a developer at Google (mostly on Google Reader) and author of many cool things that you have heard of or used, released a Python program today called Mail Trends that “let’s you analyze and visualize your email.” The program will generate a page like the Trends page in Google Reader or that in Search History, with information such as the trend of the email’s incoming/outgoing traffics and “Top people that I send mail to”.

The program is currently for Gmail only, but it has plans to offer support for other email services (with IMAP). It should take only a few minutes to generate the Mail Trends page, but that really depends on how many emails you have (as well as your computer).

On a related note, Web History Trends haven’t been updated for almost 3 weeks.

Google launched Google Checkout Trends today. Similar to Google Trends, it’s a tool that “aggregates the sales data of Google Checkout merchants” and show the charts of the revenues of the products you enter. You can filter the chart by time and price of the items.

It’s possible to get the data of the charts in CSV format and use in your (online) applications, but I won’t explain the details here (really obvious if you are already developing your own application).

[via Official Google Checkout Blog]

Google today announced the fastest rising terms (and falling terms) of 2007. As you can see above, the fastest rising term (not the most searched) is iPhone on both the U.S. and Global list.

Sorry for my ignorance, I have not heard of neither webkinz nor badoo, until now. (Like last year, I haven’t heard of the popular social networking site Bebo) Guess what? I just looked them up on Google. :)

There’s still a whole month before the end of 2007, why is Google announcing the lists so early? You know, something big (e.g. Santa’s for real, aliens take over the moon, Haochi found the real “answer to life the universe and everything” …) might happen. :P

UPDATE: CNet says that Google is going to release a Trends API - eventually. UPDATE II: Oops, it turns out that this is NOT the official year-end Zeitgeist. My bad. :-/ UPDATE III: Okay, now this is the real Google Zeitgeist 2007.

The orkut Blog launched a new monthly “column” on their blog, called “orkut trends“, to “share some of the fascinating trends that [they’ve] discovered about orkut users through looking at the aggregate trends of [the] user base.”

The first orkut trends report concluded that, “fully two-thirds of Orkut users who rated themselves said they were more attractive than average (giving a new meaning to average). Asians were most likely (32%) to consider themselves average looking. Oceania residents were most likely to rate themselves as “mirror-cracking material” (14%), and South Americans the least likely (4%).”

I thought that “mirror-cracking” means very attractive, but oh well, it’s just an opinion.

Bonus: While I was “researching” stuff for this post, I found this interesting slide show presentation by (part-time) Googler Ellen Spertus (aka “Sexiest Geek Alive”) about Orkut’s friends/ community recommendation system.

UPDATE: Oops, forgot the mention that there are some protests going on over at Flickr.

The Official Google Blog announced yesterday that they will be updating Google Trends’ data everyday “with the latest information” (it used to be updated once per month). It’s cool, but too bad they don’t actually let you have the data in the form that’s readable by machine.

Well, who knows, they may just do that as well.

Google Hot Trends now has an hourly feed that you can subscribe to so that you will know what in the world people are up to on Google. I personally don’t (and probably won’t) find this feed useful, but as always, other might appreciate it (e.g. news agencies).

I am serious, I didn’t know any of those 5 hot queries listed above until now. (I might have heard of MoveOn.org) I think the only “hot query” that I searched recently would be the bin Laden tape…

[via Google Operating System]

Eww, Google says that microwaved babies are spicy… Yuck, it sickens me…

I bet Google didn’t expect that coming with their labels of Hotness in the new Google Trends.

[via Flickr]

First was Google Zeitgeist that publishes lists of popular queries, then the Google Trends that shows the amount of searches of a query over a period of time, now followed by Hot Trends, a nice little toy that was added to Google Trends today. Hot Trends, in Google’s word, is “a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time.”

Hot Trends displays a list of the “current top 100 fastest rising search queries in the U.S.” and you can navigate through historical top queries. The most current list updates several times a day.

*I have modified the screen shot to fit the screen, but number 10 on the screen shot is for real.