SwingVine, a site that lets you see what content is trending on the web, is adding real-time functionality. SwingVine aggregates data and news from across the web, analyzes the volume of online buzz and the reputation of various sources, evaluates user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on the web. It’s a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web.
Adding the ability to see trends and buzz on the web in real-time makes complete sense for SwingVine. The startup determines trends based on factors such as volume, recency, and growth rate of web news, sales data, critic reviews, onsite pageviews, clicks, and other data points around topics. Swingvine is also launching a Facebook app to mine and aggregate trends from your existing Facebook friends, incorporating social results into your trends. You can connect SwngVine with Facebook via Facebook Connect.
So when users sign in, social trends are added based on the number of friends who engaged with various topics, the type of engagement (like vs comment vs share etc.), and the recency of engagement. Social trends can be separated from web trends. And unsurprisingly, when topics are popular in both a social circle and on the broader web, they are ranked higher.
As we’ve written in the past, content on SwingVine spreads over a number of verticals including music, movies, technology, gadgets, fashion and more. ou can also rate and comment on the item, and share your comment on Facebook, Digg or MySpace. The site’s purpose is noble— with so much content emerging on the web, from music to movies to news and tech gadgets, there is a need for a tool to help people know what’s worth reading into.
SwingVine competes with other small yet well-funded niche social search engines like OneRiot and Blekko, that also offer users a way to see the chatter, and make sense of trends, on the web. And of course, Google Trends and Twitter’s trending topics sites like Topsy (which just launched new features today)TweetMeme also serve a similar purpose as SwingVine.