The beauty of the internet is software becomes so easy to use that you can access hundreds of small but useful services without thinking about them . . . until they’re gone.

One site I find very useful for tracking the progress of new buzz words (remember, I’m a marketing dweeb) was Eirik Solheim’s Trendmapper. The concept of Trendmapper is simple, every night it submits a search for keywords submitted by users, gathers the results from the major search engines and graphs the result over time. In addition to seeing how certain terms do, or more often don’t, catch on it was interesting to see what terms people searched for. You’ll find “3tera,” “AppLogic” (both with a couple of exclusions that were necessary when we were small) as well as my name in the main search list. There are even a couple of brand names we considered before settling on 3tera and AppLogic.

Unfortunately, at the end of July, Trendmapper stopped updating its graphs. Eirik’s latest post over the weekend says simply “I need to do some major changes.”

Trendmapper’s just the latest in a long list of services to experience growing pains when the load gets beyond a few users. You may discount the significance of losing this little app, or you might just chalk it up to bad programming. However, I think it’s part of a more important trend. The internet isn’t just a collection of applications, but an ecosystem. Trendmapper was an excellent example of how a simple application could take data and turn it into information; an ever more impressive and necessary feat as the volume of data we all deal with grows geometrically. Sure, Google could provide the same data, but first it’d have to be a google sized market and I’m afraid most applications will simply never meet that criteria.