OK – so one more trend-tracker, like Twist and Googlefight that I mentioned here. This one is Facebook’s Lexicon, and it (obviously) tracks the occurrence of words on Facebook. I think this one has a little more potential as a trend-tracker than Googlefight or Twist. Googlefight scours a search engine (and therefore web pages rather than actual conversations) for terms, so it is not really user-relevant. Plus, of course, it isn’t even run by Google. Twist is a decent comparison tool because it tracks usage of terms on Twitter, which is powered by users (roughly over 1 million by now, according to TechCrunch, but there is a caveat).
However, Lexicon is at this stage the most useful because it tracks usage of terms on Facebook, which even in January this year had over 70 million users. So, if you’re a brand looking to track how you are doing versus your competitors, this may point you in some (however vague) direction. I did one comparison using Nokia and the iPhone and this is what came up. You’ll notice a spike in the iPhone’s occurrence as a term in December 2007 and one in Nokia’s in January 2008. But overall, obviously the iPhone trumps Nokia.
One Size Fits One 