Argh, I’m getting sick of this. I came across ClickTale today, an Israeli startup that provides really detailed web analytics for websites. They offer webmasters the opportunity to track every click and keystroke a user makes on a webpage, and they even compile those sessions into videos that you can watch to see how the user interacts with your webpage.
I’ve been thinking about something almost identical (though targetted at a different audience) for several months now. Of course, it isn’t like this is rocket science: they’ve basically done a lot of grunt work to write some very elaborate Javascript that you can insert into your website’s template, which will then send an async packet (we’re AJAX haxors!) back to the server every time the the mouse moves, or there’s a click or a keystroke, or the page scrolls. The server then compiles this information into meaningful statistics. Combining this data with the URL of the page makes it simple to recreate the user’s session as a video.
Hmm. Actually, their website says it’s “a hosted service, so no installation on the server or client is needed”, which maybe a deliberate attempt to throw off competitors. I don’t think they’re in any real danger of having someone simply replicate the async packet sending and offer that as a competitor — the sheer amount of data this thing is going to generate is going to make it completely useless unless they generate quality stats that are human-comprehensible.
Returning to the point, I think this is another reminder I need to get my act together and start implementing the Grand Idea. There was a story yesterday about how Kevin Rose created Digg for just $200 by employing a freelance PHP guy. Maybe I need to stop being possessive and admit I don’t have enough time to devote to this…
Grand Idea? sounds interesting.
Indeed.