Discovering what is the latest and the greatest on the web is quite a task these days. With so many aggregators and services keeping track of the latest stories, and then others rating them up and down, which one is the best source for top internet searches? While that is a debate for another day, there is a webapp that answers the “What’s Hot, Right Now” question with a unique take.
It is called Chromomulator. Chromomulator decides what’s hot (and therefore potentially interesting for you as well) by looking at what people are looking for. This is achieved by fetching the top trending topics from Google Trends.
Once it has the top 100 topics, Chromomulator aggregates news items, blog posts, pictures and videos about them from Google News, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Flickr and Youtube respectively — all into one convenient place.
So hop over to Chromomulator and you see the current top 100 Internet searches neatly laid out in two separate columns on each side of the webpage. Some of the topics are well suited for pictures and images, while other are not, so don’t be surprised if Flickr and YouTube do not return results for quite a few topics.
Chromomulator offers RSS feeds that help you stay atop of the trending topics or you could follow @chromomulator on Twitter.
Idea for the mashup is great, however there are a few chinks that are evident. First off by the looks of it, the trending topics appear to be from Google Trends (USA). While some of the trending topics would be the same all over the world in particular situations (think recent MJ searches), what about the trending topics “in your part of the world”? This is what I mean (trending topics for USA and India):
For best results, you need to refresh often (you can use ReloadEvery addon) because the ranked trending topic changes. If you haven’t refreshed from the time you last loaded the page, the results on Chromomulator will not reflect the true ranked trending topics on Google Trends. This was the one thing I found quite annoying: you click on a link hoping to read about Transformers because that is what the #X topic when you last loaded Chromomulator, instead you will be taken to details of what actually is #X on Google Trends currently.
That said, it a great idea and has a huge potential for expansion, it would be interesting to see how Chromomulator develops further. Meanwhile, you let us know what you think of Chromomulator’s results.
Does it capture what you would call the buzz? How do you stack it against Twitter or popurls as a tool for capturing the top Internet searches? Let us know in the comments.
Tagged: aggregator • popular • social media • web trends
