NEW YORK -- It shocked many pundits when ABC's new series "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" became the breakout hits of the new television season.

But not the folks at Initiative, a top New York media agency, who say they've developed a new tool to help predict which shows will succeed or flop.

The research device combs the Internet to pick up buzz. They hope to sell its findings to networks, advertisers and ad agencies.

"Does this mean we can predict all success? No," said Alec Gerster, Initiative chief executive. "But it does seem to pick up a growing word-of-mouth about a particular show. Historically, that's always been there."

Trying to pick a hit show in advance is like trying to predict the scores of this week's football games. It's good sport for fans, but for television executives who must make million-dollar decisions based on gut instincts, their jobs depend on it.

Getting early tips on which shows people are eager to see can help networks decide where to spend promotional money, and advertisers decide where to buy commercials.

The device, called PropheSEE, measures which shows are being talked about most on the Internet. Unlike other systems that do the same thing, it also gauges whether the talk is positive or negative.

Both "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" ranked in the top five new shows for advance word-of-mouth, Initiative said.

"Joey" was the show with the most pre-air buzz. Unfortunately for NBC, some of that chatter was negative, said Stacey Lynn Koerner, Initiative's top researcher.

The show's performance has reflected that ambivalence: it's the most successful new sitcom on the air, yet last week didn't even make Nielsen Media Research's top 20 shows for the week.

Two of the shows in Initiative's bottom five haven't made the air yet. It has to be an ominous sign for NBC that one of them is "The Contender," the midseason boxing series developed by Mark Burnett and Sylvester Stallone, which the network captured in a bidding war.

"This isn't the be-all and end-all of predictions," Koerner said. "It's the early warning system."

One of the top network researchers, CBS' David Poltrack, questions the value of PropheSEE. CBS, which has a research facility in Las Vegas, already surveys viewers in the summer about which new shows they've heard about and are looking forward to watching.

The Initiative device also doesn't take into account people who are not active on the Internet, he said.

"I don't see that this adds anything significant," Poltrack said.

Initiative, which developed PropheSEE with the research firms Trendum and TVtracker.com, said there's a value in collecting the opinions of people who aren't aware there being surveyed. Initiative is a firm that advises advertisers on where they should target their commercials.

It's bound to be of value to industry executives at the mercy of the general public.

"The amount of panic about loss of control is palpable within the industry," Koerner said.