I really liked the idea behind a product called Trendly (unfortunately it got shut down because Twitter bought the team). They had some clever algorithms that

I really liked the idea behind a product called Trendly (unfortunately it got shut down because Twitter bought the team). They had some clever algorithms that simplified time series data from google analytics so that you could see at what points real changes occurred. Some screenshots here: http://analytics.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/api-integration-to-measure-significant.html http://analytics.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/api-integration-to-... You can see how it's able to take something noisy like time series data and turn it into a stream of discrete events. It's really quite clever.