ResearchBuzz

Around two weeks ago, nulab Inc. announced the launch of Cacoo, a new service for making wireframes, sitemaps, and other diagrammish things. It’s available at http://cacoo.com/. It’s in beta and is currently free, though a premium plan is expected in the “middle of 2010″. For making diagrams and charts online I like Lovely Charts, but I decided to review Cacoo because it allows multiple people to edit charts together in real time. I’m glad I did; this is a great tool!

You have to register, of course. Once you’ve done that, you get a Flash application that allows you to build charts/diagrams using drag and drop images from a variety of libraries, including people, flowcharts, networks, office equipment, etc. Dotted blue lines appear and disappear as Cacoo shows you how your new images line up with other images that you already have in your chart area.

Once you have an image in the chart window, you can resize it, rotate it, add text, etc. There are also tools for rotation, arranging, layers, etc. A line tool makes connecting images very quick and easy. Once the Flash was loaded I experienced very little lag in using it. Here’s a screenshot of some different elements from the libraries connected together randomly.

Once you’ve created your masterpiece, you can save it to the service (a simple checkbox allows you to indicate whether you want your item to be public and gives you the public URL) or you can export it to the PNG format. There’s also a Share window that lets you invite other people to use and work on your diagram; you can either search Cacoo IDs or send invites to specified e-mail addresses.

Between the easy-to-use text and connection tools, and the lines show you how your new elements are lining up with everything else, I am extremely impressed with Cacoo. I am not at my best with these kinds of tools but Cacoo was intuitive and when I got stuck, a right-click or closer look at the menu usually set me on the right track. The only tiny little thing is that sometimes the English on the menu isn’t quite perfect (nulab is based in Japan) but who cares? It was never enough to make using the service confusing. Highly recommended.

Google announced in a blog post this week new features for its Google Insights for Search, available at http://www.google.com/insights/search/. The new features include lots more languages (a total of 39!) and even a forecasting feature.

Have you used Google Insights for Search? You can enter one or more search terms, specify factors like a time range, type of search (news, images, Web, etc.) and geographic area of the world, and Google will give you a graph of how much that search has been requested over time, along with pointers to news stories about your query and information on the search’s popularity in different geographic areas. Take a look at an example screenshot I did for the search recycling.

You’ll see that there’s a graph here showing the activity for the search query “recycling” since 2004. But if you’ll look closely you’ll see that the solid line ends in a dotted line as the Google Insights tool attempts to guess how popular a query will be until 2011. The blog mentions that this forecasting tool is for “some queries” but in my testing it seems like even more obscure queries got a forecast. Fairly recent trending topics like crasher squirrel, however, appear less likely to get a trend line, and I did find some queries that didn’t get a forecast even though they had a long history in the search trend graph.

Google Insights also has an animated map now! If you look a little further down on the page, you’ll see a map that shows interest in a particular search query by country. If you look at the bottom of the map there’s also a link that will animate the map to show you the search volume for a query changes in different countries over time.

If you find you like the information you’re finding with this Google feature, there are several things you can do with it. You can embed the graphs. You can use a module to add a chart to iGoogle. You can download a CSV of the data.

While I thought the forecast part of Insight was interesting, I never found a case where it was radical — where it indicated that a query was really going to take off like a rocket or that it would drop off a cliff. Either one of those cases would have made me more interested in watching that query. Instead I use Google Insights for Search to get a history of a query — did a search term have a particular time when it really took off? What were the search results for it right before then? Google Insight also has lists of related topic and related rising searches. Sometimes these help me decide how I want to refine a query, especially when using alert services.