Wii Looks like the Most Popular Christmas Gift This Year
by
on December 26, 2008,
I believe no one will argue that once a person receives something as a gift, he or she will often be inclined to go online searching for additional information about this thing (especially if it is a gadget that requires some technical knowledge or instructions) or at least to share their joy of having this new thing on Twitter or on their blogs maybe.
So I wanted to see what items are most heavily discussed today as I felt that interest to these items today must be a good indication of the number of internet users who got these items as Christmas gifts. So after my quick research it now looks to me that Nintendo Wii must have been one of the most popular Christmas gifts this year.
Wii has been very hot on Twitter for lengthy hours now with Twitter users either talking about playing Wii Fit with their spouses (after those spouses gave them the gaming console) or about how happy their children are playing Nintendo Wii brought by Santa during the Christmas night.
The situation is pretty similar when one looks at what’s hot today among internet users in general. Google Trends is usually a good indication of what people care about on any given day - and Wii occupies quite a large space in the minds of Google users on the day after Christmas. Now that everyone is unwrapping gifts and figuring out how to use the freshly acquired gadgets, it is obvious that Nintendo Wii was an item purchased quite frequently as a gift with Google users searching for “wii remote”, “nintendo”, “wii controller” and most certainly many other phrases related to the widely popular gaming console.
The only other gadget that has been searched for a lot today is slingbox which has also probably been given to quite a number of Google users for Christmas which means that many of them will be enjoying the newly-launched Sling website that we recently reviewed here even more than they can do without the TV device.
To me it all looks like very interesting information: people actually give presents that are not actually useful (unless you actually think of Wii Fit as a tool to keep fit) and are purely intended for entertainment while I somehow thought that during the severe financial crisis like the one we are living in now people will choose something useful as gifts - things like clothing or home appliances, for example. But it looks like the crisis has not hit as many people as I thought it would and many are still perfectly ready to enjoy their lives and share the joy with their loved ones giving them the presents that are enjoyable but not exactly useful.
