Poor Man's Technology Hype Cycles

I recently stumbled upon Gartner’s Hype Cycle Builder, which simply put allows you to build custom Gartner’s hype cycle graphs for a given technology innovation or architecture. Unfortunately, it’s only available for paying clients

Poor Man’s Gartner’s Hype Cycle Builder !

So I set out to build a poor man’s version of it and see if all technology trends follow this hype cycle.

Before moving, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Gartner Hype Cycle (it’s fairly straight forward) :

The Gartner hype cycle is a graphical presentation developed, used and branded by the American research, advisory and information technology firm Gartner to represent the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies.

Gartner Hype Cycle

Trend Data

Here again we’ll have to improvise !

As we don’t have access to Gartner’s trend database, we will rely on Google Trends to find the trend curve for a given keyword. Google Trends defines interest over time as the following :

Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

Hype Cycle over Google Trends

Now to the fun part !

First we’ll get the Google Trends graph for a given keyword, then we’ll plot a hype cycle over it as best as we can. We’ll try to generate the hype cycle by smoothing out the Google Trends graph and then try to interpret the smoothed graph as the hype cycle.

This method is by no means an accurate measure of hype, but it’s accurate enough for our case. In addition to this I’m going to use the following assumptions :

Sharp increase in graph’s slope => more search/interest => Technology Trigger
Sharp decrease in graph’s slope following a sharp increase => interest quickly dwindling => Peak of Inflated Expectations and Trough of Disillusionment
Smooth increase after local bottom => renewed serious interest => Slope of Enlightenment
Stable and slightly decreasing slope => stable interest and more serious usage => Plateau of Productivity

Hype Cycles

Each of the following illustrations is an attempt to draw a hype curve over Google Trends data for a given technology. The hype curve (red curve) is just the moving average of the Google Trends curve.