There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day. I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by? So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web: Bloglines I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off. Del.icio.us I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon. FeedBurner I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page. Flickr I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect. Measuremap The Measure Map blog analytics → Read More
Brandon Schauer’s post and associated PDF historical timeline is an excellent resource to put web 2.0 companies into perspective and to understand their place in the overall ecosystem. I’ll be referring to it often in TechCrunch posts. More on CrunchNotes. → Read More
Google took the wrapper off Analytics today. It is a rebranding of their Urchin acquisition from earlier this year. It works in much the same way as MeasureMap – using it requires the addition of javascript into a couple of files on your blog. It has deep integration into Adwords as well. Google Analytics is mostly free (up to 5 million page views per month), or completely free if you are an adwords user. Registration for Analytics is currently suspended but I’ll be doing a full side by side review against Measure Map in the next day or two. The screen shot provided by Google (to left) is encouraging. One thing I’d like to understand is whether Google Analytics takes a holistic approach to blog analytics like Measure Map does, or whether it is a more generic application for measuring general website statistics. Measure Map is awesome at monitoring traffic at the post and comment level and has used flash and Ajax integration in a very intelligent way. More on the Meme. UPDATE: The site has been down all day and they have suspended registrations for now. The bigger problem appears to be that Google didn’t notify Urchin’s paid subscribers ($200/month) that the change was going to happen, and those subscribers have no access to their data right now. Ethan Stock tells the story and he is pissed off. Google isn’t acting like a real business, they are acting like an over-enthusiastic Golden Retriever puppy. Oh, they just knocked the vase off the table with their tail, but aren’t they cute? Um, no. Google, grow up. → Read More
Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path writes about Measure Map for the first time today. Measure Map is an incredibly easy to use flash and ajax application that monitors blog traffic and analytics in many, many different ways. You can slice data almost every way imaginable. I’ll do a full review as soon as I have their permission. In his post, Jeffrey provides a screen shot of the dashboard of the application, the first to appear publicly on the web. I took this as permission to post my own screen shot to the left. They have not finalized pricing, but my understanding is it may be free for everything except real-time data. Jeffrey also says that the application should be launched by end of year. If you want to try it out sooner, request a beta account at their site. Here is our quick pitch: Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. We do this by collecting and analyzing blog-specific traffic statistics and presenting them in a browsable interface that encourages exploration. It is an experience that offers meaningful insight into the effects caused by small changes in how you blog, rather than the overwhelming complexity of most web stats tools with their query/report-style analytic methods. Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs. We do this with a few lines of code in your blog’s template; there’s hardly any configuration to worry about. We collect your traffic data continuously and in real time and display it through some innovative Ajax-based techniques. But even though we’re a hosted service, you own your data. An open API will empower you to do whatever you like with your numbers — we’ve already built an OS X Dashboard widget, for example. Imagine what else you could do with your blog’s stats… We’ll be opening the doors soon — probably towards the end of the year. For now, we’re metering our growth with an invitation system to ensure that we can provide an appropriate level of service for our users as we grow. You can sign up for one at measuremap.com. In the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about Measure Map, the experience of building it, and what our plans for it are. But for now, I’m just so happy our little team has reached this milestone. → Read More
