Edopter is an online service that tracks the spread of new trends around the world in real time. The goal is to combine user insights and worldwide buzz to "tap into the next big thing." The project is headed and co-founded by Matthew Rosenberg and Andy ThompSon of One Blue Brick. They commissioned me to create a fun, but informative, analytical space to allow users of the edopter service to track in depth the progress of trends.

The tube or channel of blue dots crossing the top of the screen represents site traffic. Each dot is an edopter.com user. Those user dots that fall out of that line and get sucked into the trend represent edopter users that have evaluated the trend positively or negatively (they formally get in or out of the trend). Once they are sucked in, they position themselves on the sparkline according to the point in time they opted for "out" or "in" status. If they opt "in," the sparkline moves up, and if they opt "out," then down. Users who opted to get in on the trend take the risk because it may elevate their status system wide (which can win them prizes and influence) if the trend succeeds and moves on to mainstream status.

Each day, the web is swept by way of third party APIs to see if there is any media has been created about this trend, so every day, a marker added to the sparkline to indicate if such a sweep has revealed any buzz, something that also elevates the status of a trend.