Signal VS Noise – Friend Trend
Continuing with the signal vs noise theme, I thought I’d take a quick look at the iPhone app Friend Trend from AKI Creative Inc.
What this app does is generate a “trending topics” list from JUST the people you follow on Twitter. You can sort for words or hashtags by timeframe. If you find a tweet you want to respond to or retweet, you can do that right from that app as well. This is all Friend Trend does. That’s it. And I like it.
I like it because it’s another tool that allows me quickly focus on what might be signal and ignore whatever I’m considering to be “noise” at the moment. As you can see from the screen shot to the right, it presents me with a list of the top trending words or hashtags. When I click on the individual listing, I see all of the tweets using that word or hashtag. Nice. You can see more screen shots below.
Where does it fall short?
Well, first of all, tools like this will likely fall short for you at some point based on the limitations of the Twitter API. Unless your storing the data off to your own server for analysis, you’ll be limited to what Twitter will feed the apps. You won’t be able to look back very far in time either. Friend Trend has that same limitation. Also, Friend Trend doesn’t give you the option to see the trends within one of your Twitter lists. I follow many lists that contain people that I don’t follow. If you’d like to see how that works, that filtering feature can be found in Cadmus. Connect your twitter account to Cadmus and it will analyze it and spit back the triends for your friends and your lists. Be prepared for a wait, however. That kind of data crunching takes some time.
Friend Trend is a free app, with this one limitation. In the free app, trends 2-5 are invisible until you pay $0.99 to unlock them. Download it and give it a try. You can decide for yourself whether 2-5 are worth the buck. 
