It’s incredible how many different URL shortening services have cropped up in the last few years. With the rise of microblogging, any way to save characters really makes a difference. In fact, without services like TinyURL, there wouldn’t be any way to put most URL’s in a single tweet, let alone add text to describe the link.
Despite the diversity of URL shorteners out there, none of them are quite like tr.im. The easiest way to explain tr.im is to walk you through the process of shortening a URL with it. First of all, take any URL you like. For my example I’m going to use the front page of MakeUseOf.
Google Trends is an interesting and entertaining analytical tool that shows level of people’s interest in particular topics over some time period. If you want to know popularity for certain topics over the last year or month this is the tool to use.
Google is largest and most widely used search engine on the web with more then 2.5 billion searches conducted every month (more here). By selecting portion of this data and analyzing how many times ‘terms you entered’ have been searched relative to the total number of searches on Google over the days, it generates trends. These trends are based on the real searches conducted by people hence they show trends of community towards the topic. Remember recent buzz regarding US ports takeover? See the trend here
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