There are many ways in which to search for real-time trends on TrendSpottr. In addition to standard keywords and phrases, TrendSpottr also supports search queries based on common Twitter conventions (e.g., $stock, @name, #hashtag) as well as Twitter lists URLs. Using these various search methods will dramatically improve the quality and breadth of your trending results.

Another way to improve and extend your TrendSpottr experience is to use boolean operators. One of the most powerful boolean operators in TrendSpottr is “OR”. Adding OR (all caps, no quotations) in between two or more search terms will bring back consolidated, ranked, real-time trending results for all the included search terms. 

For example, say you’re a political strategist interested in comparing the top trends for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Entering the following search query in TrendSpottr: Mitt Romney OR Rick Santorum provides consolidated trending results for both terms and ranks the results to provide a real-time analysis of their relative trending strength. 

The “OR” operator is also a powerful competitive intelligence tool. Brands can use it to compare and benchmark their virality and real-time share of voice against their competitors (e.g., Pepsi OR Coca Cola). Similarly, stock traders can use “OR” to compare the trending velocity of related stocks (e.g., $aapl OR $goog).

Finally, publishers and media companies can use “OR” to understand in real-time how their content is faring against their competitors. By using TrendSpottr in this way, publishers like the New York Times can compare the virality and trending intensity of their published stories versus a competitor like The Washington Post. 

Give “OR” a try on our HootSuite app as well as on our main site. 

Last week we launched our new TrendSpottr app for HootSuite. This new app is available to all HootSuite users and can be installed from HootSuite’s App Directory. 

One of the great features of HootSuite is the ability to create tabs to track specific streams. This feature can also be used with the TrendSpottr app to organize and monitor trends for broad topics or categories of interest, such as “News Sources”, “Brands”, “Stocks” and “Cities”. Within each tab, multiple search terms can be added and continuously tracked. 

For example, in the screenshot below, the “News Sources” tab is tracking four searches: Techcrunch, Guardian, Nyti.ms and @latimes. Clicking on this tab will always display the top trending content from these four publishers. It’s the best way to discover the top trending content from all of your favorite news sources in one consolidated view. 

Instructions:

To add a tab: click the “Add Tab” button at the top of the HootSuite dashboard. 

To add a new search column: Click “Add Stream”, Select “Apps”, then click on the “+” sign next to the TrendSpottr app. Repeat to add multiple search columns.

Give it a try by heading over to HootSuite and adding the TrendSpottr app. 

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new TrendSpottr app for HootSuite. Available in the HootSuite App Directory, the TrendSpottr app is now a click away for HootSuite’s 3 million+ social media users. 

Featuring full integration with HootSuite’s social dashboard and a completely new look and user interface, the TrendSpottr app makes it easier than ever to discover and publish trending stories, viral videos and more to all of your social networks. 

Whether you are a brand manager or PR agency interested in monitoring real-time trends, a journalist or blogger in search of emerging stories, or a social media user that wants to be the first to spot viral trends, TrendSpottr will help you discover the most trending content from across the social web. 

TrendSpottr can even transport you to the future by predicting the topics, issues and news stories that will matter in the next few hours and days. 

Install the new TrendSpottr app now at HootSuite and stay ahead of the trend. 

We live in a Big Data world where information is growing at an exponential rate. Each day almost 5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook and Twitter. IBM reports that: “There are expected to be 1 trillion new devices connected to the Internet in the near future, which will help drive 44X digital data growth by the year 2020, 80 percent of which will be unstructured content and will require great effort to analyze.” 

The exponential growth in Big Data poses significant scalability and performance challenges for traditional data analytics, social media monitoring and business intelligence solutions. These solutions which have been architected to index, store and process the full firehose of Big Data will need to expend significant capital resources (e.g., storage, servers, infrastructure) to simply maintain their core service offering. Meanwhile, the response time required to analyze and process Big Data will continue to increase creating performance and usability related problems.  

At the same time as the explosion in data is occurring, there is another trend that has huge implications for Big Data. It should come as no surprise that in our fast-paced, multi-tasking, micro-blogging obsessed world, the shelf life of information is shrinking rapidly. In fact, recent studies by Bitly confirm our own research that the half-life of social content (i.e., half the clicks or engagement social links will ever experience) is about 3 hours.

What this means is that the value of information is shifting to real-time. The more timely the information, the more relevant it is. Conversely, the value and relevance of data erodes quickly, in a matter of hours. As an example, a shared link from 30 days ago is far less valuable in terms of its potential impact on user engagement and decision-making than a similar link that has just been shared.

Herein lies the Paradox of Big Data. Just at the moment when data is exploding, the value and relevance of information is diminishing with every passing second.

As a result, a moment of change has arrived for Big Data. Today’s analytics solutions need to scale with the growth of the Internet, identify relevance in real-time, discern trends from incomplete or partial data and be able to predict the impact of information as it happens. 

This is precisely the approach and solution we developed for TrendSpottr. A real-time, scalable data analytics service that that analyzes events as they occur to identify and predict trends from real-time data streams.

As noted during GigaOm’s recent Structure Big Data Conference: “With data science, the moment of change has arrived, and companies that will succeed will be the ones that develop tools to enable that real-time data.”

We recently received a request from a website that profiles startups and entrepreneurs to run a story on TrendSpottr. While we’ll link to the story once it’s published, here’s the Q&A that we exchanged with the writer. We hope you find this information “timely” and “relevant”.

1.  How did the idea of TrendSpottr first come to you?

My cofounder (@Alain_Chesnais) and I (@markzohar) came up with the idea for TrendSpottr in July 2010. We had worked together at a previous startup and we were both fascinated by the challenges and opportunities presented by the exponential growth in data. We were particularly intrigued by the growth in crowdsourced and crowdshared information, such as Facebook, Twitter and now Google +. We recognized that existing data analytics solutions would not be able to scale efficiently or effectively to handle this exponential data growth (eg., capital costs for servers and storage, processing timeframes, etc.). We also recognized a fundamental value shift occurring with respect to the relevance of data — from being focused mostly on retrospective and descriptive analysis (e.g., traditional social monitoring and analytics) to becoming increasingly focused on real-time and predictive analysis. In fact, our first prototypes confirmed that the half-life of social data was measured in hours not days.

We saw an opportunity to approach the problem of data analytics from a new perspective; focusing on real-time and predictive data analysis that would identify the most timely, relevant and trending information from a firehose of content. This approach led us to develop the core TrendSpottr algorithms which identify real-time trending information at its earliest acceleration point to provide our users with relevant early insights. Our users have access to information that is available hours or even days before it has reached general awareness.

In essence, TrendSpottr acts as an early warning system to alert users to the most important and trending information about the topics and issues they follow. The predictive part of our service is that each piece of content we identify as “trending” has implicit predictive value and will continue to have viral impact for the next several hours or days. As a result, we can accurately claim that information “spotted” by TrendSpottr will continue to have resonance and impact for the next 8-48 hours. 

2.  Could you explain what real-time trends mean in everyday language?

Real-time trends represent the most timely and relevant information about any topic. TrendSpottr answers the question: “What’s important and relevant now?”.  The reason real-time trends are deemed timely and relevant is that they demonstrate the highest velocity, acceleration and amplification of any similar content.  

3.  When you refer to real-time trends for any topic, does it mean only global topics or does it also include topics that are more local in nature?

TrendSpottr identifies real-time trends for any topic whether it be global or local. In fact, using our “Advanced Search” feature, users can filter real-time trending results by specific location or city. For example, a user can search for real-time trends about “Entrepreneur” worldwide or choose to filter the results for “Entrepreneur” to view trending results only from New York or London. 

4. In what ways can communities, organizations or individuals benefit from TrendSpottr?

Our service significantly improves the signal-to-noise problem with social media. A TrendSpottr search provides the most timely and relevant information, organized and curated in a way that’s easy to understand, consume and share. Secondly, TrendSpottr serves as an early warning system for governments, brands and organizations and alerts them to trending issues that will continue to accelerate in importance and impact. The ability to identify crises, breaking news and viral behaviour hours or days before its impact reaches general awareness is the core value proposition of TrendSpottr. Finally, many media companies and social media leaders are using TrendSpottr to increase their online engagement and influence by spotting and publishing timely information that has both high resonance and virality. As a result, our users are increasing their online presence (more followers, retweets, shares, etc.), increasing their Klout scores, and are literally “ahead of the curve” when it comes to information relevance and timeliness.

5. What kind of future plans do you have for TrendSpottr?

We launched TrendSpottr as a free-to-use general purpose site in July 2011. We have been delighted by the response to our service and we have a very dedicated and loyal user base. In fact, almost 50% of our users return to TrendSpottr on a regular basis. In the next 60 days, we will be launching a premium version that will include several new and advanced features, including streaming analytics, personalized alerts and notifications and historical trend analysis. These premium services will be offered on a paid subscription basis and will be targeted at PR agencies and brands, the financial community, bloggers and social media influencers, newsrooms and journalists, and government agencies. In addition, we will soon be launching with several partners that will integrate and promote TrendSpottr across their websites and applications. These partners include major media sites and digital publishers, large data and content providers and content marketing companies. 

What are you waiting for? Head over to TrendSpottr.com and try it for yourself!

We are very excited to announce today our partnership with DataSift, a powerful real-time social media data filtering platform. This partnership integrates TrendSpottr’s and DataSift’s services to provide customers with early and predictive insights from their personalized, filtered data streams. 

In addition to offering licensed access to the full Twitter data stream, DataSift’s platform can filter the firehose by keyword or phrase, geo-location, demographics, sentiment, social influence and more. By integrating with DataSift, we can now offer our customers a premium real-time trending service that generates trending results from filtered data streams; e.g., real-time trends for “Coca-Cola” from conversations that originate in North America, from female users, that have a positive sentiment, and a Klout influence score of 40 and above. 

At the same time, TrendSpottr will be offering our real-time trending service on the DataSift platform directly to DataSift users. As a result, DataSift users will be able to receive relevant real-time trends from their filtered streams; e.g, the top real-time trending links, videos, images, hashtags and phrases from their stream. This real-time intelligence will not only improve the signal-to-noise ratio from DataSift streams but will also provide users with early and predictive insights about major trending events, social behaviors, customer preferences and impending crises. 

We believe that the combination of DataSift’s real-time data filtering technology and TrendSpottr’s real-time trending analytics will fundamentally improve the way enterprises, media companies and social media users access social data to gain real-time insights and market intelligence. For more details about our new partnership with DataSift, please check out the official press release. 

TrendSpottr identifies real-time trends from large, unstructured data streams such as Twitter and Facebook. 

While our service, like many others, can identify information that is popular (eg., most shared links, etc.), this volumetric approach has limited value beyond content aggregation and curation. Popular information has, by definition, already reached a level of general awareness and most people are already able to act upon this information. 

More importantly, TrendSpottr is able to identify trending information before it has become popular. Our algorithms are tuned to identify real-time trends at their acceleration point in order to provide early and predictive insights.

The value of a real-time trending service such as TrendSpottr is that it is literally always “ahead of the curve”. TrendSpottr consistently identifies trends and trending information hours or even days before it becomes “popular” and reaches a level of general awareness. And, because TrendSpottr is a real-time service not a retrospective service like most indexing and filtering analytics applications, trends are continuously analyzed and up to date.

TrendSpottr’s early insights are invaluable to users such as daytraders, journalists, advertisers, brand managers, trend hunters and analytics companies that constantly need to stay ahead of the curve. TrendSpottr provides them with the information they need to proactively prepare for and predict market and social behaviors, consumer preferences, impending crises and major trending events. 

If you are ready for information about how you can access, customize and integrate TrendSpottr’s real-time trending service into your website or application, please contact us at api@trendspottr.com.  

UPDATE: We recently launched TrendSpottr on HootSuite. Give it a try by heading to HootSuite’s App Directory and installing the TrendSpottr app. We also put together this quick overview video with tips and tricks for viral content discovery. Hope you enjoy!

We’ve added a cool new feature to the TrendSpottr site today that we think you’ll really like. You can now use Twitter list URLs in our search bar to automatically generate trending results from a curated list of Twitter users.

For example, if you’re interested in Tech, you can copy and paste Robert Scoble’s “most influential in tech” Twitter list (https://twitter.com/#!/Scobleizer/most-influential-in-tech) into the TrendSpottr search bar and see what’s trending among the top technorati. You can view all of Scoble’s Twitter lists here.

If you’re more in the mood for Music, you can use the Twitter list of the top music bloggers as curated by the music aggregator Elbo.ws (https://twitter.com/#!/elbows/music-blogs).

Using Twitter list URLs in TrendSpottr is a great way to increase the relevance of trending results by focusing on a high quality and curated list of users. There are several sites that offer a directory of Twitter lists that you can peruse, including: Listorious and Listatlas.