Kontagent Offers Deep Analytics For Facebook Applications

Kontagent is an application that integrates tightly with platforms such as Facebook to offer widget and application developers a high level of analytics data. Current analytics packages for social network applications or widgets offer nothing more than pageview stats or simple user numbers (such as what Facebook publishes itself) while Kontagent is able to bury itself deeply into the platform and extract detailed user and conversion data. Kontagent, which is currently in private beta, has been in development for over 12 months now and is currently being used by a small number of high profile companies in tracking their application usage and adoption on Facebook.

We tried out Kontagent and looked at all the data it was collecting, and were impressived with the results. You can narrow down visitor information based on geographic location, age groups, sex and many other variables. All of that data is being taken out of the Facebook platform and fed into the analytics engine. The larger widget companies such as Slide and RockYou have similar deep analytics at their disposal, but Kontagent is about even up the playing field by allowing the smaller developers to get access to similar technologies. One of the most interesting statistics is virality, which tracks the number of average users each new user invites and over what period of time.

From an integration perspective, there are both client and server components that must be tied together. On the backend, Kontagent provides an API (and a library in PHP) that is used to send data back to its servers. On the frontend a Javascript include is used to send client data back. Integration is a bit more complex than a standard analytics engine, but if offers much richer and more interesting data. For an average developer, integration should take an hour or two, and shouldn’t require long-term maintenance within the application itself.

Kontagent was founded by Albert Lai, who previously was the founder of BubbleShare and Jeff Tseng. They have raised a small round of funding from valley-based sources and their team is split between San Francisco and Toronto, Canada. Their intention with the product is to make it available for free to low-end developers, while charging a fee for commercial applications. Currently Facebook is supported by in the near future support for MySpace will roll out as well as other platforms. Users interested in participating in the private beta can submit their details on the website.