What Google Trends Says About Rich Internet Applications

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Google Trends is always kind of fun to play around with, but for some reason I hadn’t ever thrown in the various Rich Internet Application technologies. After doing so tonight, I think it’s a pretty accurate gauge of where we are today. OpenLaszlo got a big head start and has a lot of sustained growth. Flex has been steadily making gains and WPF hasn’t quite taken off yet (it was released just days ago). Also, Adobe Apollo isn’t popular enough to show up on the big board yet, but as Duane notes, we’re getting there.

Other fun searches? Adobe Flash vs. Macromedia Flash, ColdFusion vs .NET vs Java, Flash Lite vs Java ME, FLV all by itself.

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting the blog lately. I’ve been absolutely swamped and hopefully I’ll be able to talk soon about what I’m working on. Well, it looks like Matt Chotin is spamming the flexcoders list again which is my signal that it’s time to write up the Universal Desktop Daily. You can set a watch by Matt’s late night question answering.

Update: Brian Fitzgerald added Ajax to the mix and all of the pretty colors shrink waaaayy down to the bottom. Unsuprisingly, Ajax has a huge following.
[tags]Google Trends, Flex, Adobe, Windows Presentation Foundation, OpenLaszlo, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

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  • Xiaolei Shi

    “I think it’s a pretty accurate gauge of where we are today.”

    In response:

    type in “Ryan Stewart” and type in “Failure”

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    :) You’re right, since I started blogging, the failure keyword has gotten a lot more active.

  • http://www.jessewarden.com JesterXL
  • http://tanstaafl.wordpress.com Xiaolei Shi

    “You’re right, since I started blogging, the failure keyword has gotten a lot more active.”

    Well no not exactly, if Google Trends is accurate it would suggest that from the period that your blog started the popularity of “Ryan Stewart” show some relationship with the popularity of the term “failure”. As you can see the baselines of both curves and peaks are almost identical, allowing unwitting users to confuse what is numerically rigorous with pure speculation albeit with pretty graphs and colors.

    Personally, I’d like to think that I have you in a bit of a paradox. Either:

    1. Your post is wrong and you should retract the line “I think it’s a pretty accurate gauge of where we are today.” to something to the extent of “But Google Trends is a meaningless web 2.0 toy, and speculations about the future should involve the rigorous investigation, and an open mind”. Hell just remove “accurate” with “fun”.

    2. You admit that there exists a correlation between “failure” and “Ryan Stewart” in Google Trends. And believe me you’ll never hear the end of that from me.

    Best of luck in your continual construction of artifice.

    ~Kevin

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey Kevin,

    Sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday. Google trends is a fun way to look at what people are searching for. I think the graph shows that people are searching for Adobe Flex more than OpenLaszlo or Windows Presentation Foundation. Is this a scientific analysis? Nope, but it’s fun. In this case I think it’s pretty accurate as well :) .