louis gray and friendfeed

I have been a reader of Louis Gray’s blog and his Google Reader shared items for a while now and I think he is straying into the territory that Scoble used to drift into when he was at Microsoft. Namely, tunnel vision on one topic. Lous’ shared items is one huge mass of Friendfeed coverage, whilst his blog has been mentioning it in a majority of recent posts. It is starting to get a tad boring.. you like friendfeed I get it! What I don’t understand is why cover them so much? Is there some connection between Louis and friendfeed? Is this just a way of giving Louis Gray some attention? Or is it just a great service that incites this sort of coverage?

Some thoughts on Friendfeed coming up shortly..

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I have been intending to write an update to my initial look at Google Analytics for a while now and having now been using Blogbeat for a month, it makes more sense to compare the two.

Setup
Both are extremely easy to set up - its a matter of inserting a piece of code in your header or footer. Google is slightly easier because there seems to be an abundance of plugins for the various blogging tools out there. I was using Richard Boake’s tool for Wordpress which you can find here.

Google Analytics: 5
Blogbeat: 5

Features
Google Analytics allows you to keep track of up to 5 websites, whereas Blogbeat only allows you to track one. Nothing stopping you signing up to more accounts with Blogbeat but obviously at extra cost. On logging into Google Analytics, you only have to look at the menu to know there are lots of features available. Blogbeat has a much simpler menu structure.

From the perspective of a blog, both have a good set of features though. Identifying people who have come to the site via search keywords, identifying new and returning visitors and obviously numbers of people coming to the site. There is the usual information available about users in general - operating systems/browsers/screen resolutions which is more just for interest value than anything else. Google takes this further and shows plugin capabilities and bandwidth of the user. Rather strangely, Google Analytics has a very poor implementation for referrers. You can see the website referring to your site, but not the page itself. Both however track exit links (though Google tells you the number who left on your front page as well) and in effect, both track your most popular posts - Google calls them pages whereas Blogbeat calls them posts. Blogbeat has a neat feature that could allow easy targeting in the future - it allows you to name (tag) visitors so you can identify them easily in your stats - I think this is brilliant, it is manual right now but it makes your stats more personal - less ip addresses is always a good thing - though as you get more and more visitors being able to automatically tag visitors would be useful. Maybe in the future you could tag users who are interested in specific topics within your blog. Yes, obviously you could then target these people with targeted advertising, or if you are less money focused, display a customised version of your blog

Blogbeat also has integration with Feedburner for RSS tracking - it seems to only extend to number of subscribers currently - it would be nice to have all this functionality inside Blogbeat without the need to use Feedburner. There is nothing inside Google Analytics which refers to RSS feeds currently

There are a huge number of other features in Google Analytics though - none of which you would really use for a blog - ROI calculations, Search Engine Marketing (including A/B testing, source and keyword testing), Goals and Visitor Funnels.

Google Analytics: 3 (5 if you are not using a blog)
Blogbeat: 5 (3 if you are not using a blog)

User Interface

Navigation in Google Analytics is a nightmare - it is really difficult to find stuff easily - everything is deep within a multitude of menus and it usually takes a fair amount of clicking to find the stuff you need. The ability to create a user profile which removes the stuff you don’t want would be useful. Blogbeat is very easy to move around, mostly because of its specialisation in blog tracking, strangely though the graphs for visitors are in the dashboard section and completely inaccessible from the visitor’s section.

When it comes to the interface itself though, Google Analytics is graphically pleasing, it is clean and crisp and feels professional. There are a good number of graphs which illustrate trends. Blogbeat is not quite so professional looking, everything is larger and more “laid back” - maybe a sign of their target audience. I would prefer it to be more professional looking though with clean and crsip layout. Maybe it is just because there are not as many graphs in Blogbeat though.. overall both meet a good standard and get the information across.

Google Analytics: 3
Blogbeat: 4

Pricing
This is a simple one - Google Analytics is free, Blogbeat is not. Blogbeat charges $2/month after a free 30 day trial. It is not much but well compared to free it makes a difference. I wonder what will happen when Measuremap (recently bought by Google) is released to the public. If that is free, Blogbeat might have problems. On the other hand.. Measuremap may not be free

From a blog perspective, you can get by with Google Analytics, but Blogbeat feels much more intuitive. The only real additional features you get is the tagging, better referral info and feedburner integration. Is that enough?

Google Analytics: 5
Blogbeat: 3

Speed:
Analytics packages can slow your website down if they cannot cope with the demand placed on them by the number of website using their systems. Google Analytics had a huge uptake and they had to stop taking new users - it is still invitation only currently. Blogbeat is likely to keep numbers down due to its subscription payment mechanism. I would be surprised though if Google had load issues in the future, I wonder how true this is in reality? Load from either service on my website has been difficult to confirm in the past months. I did have a few slowdowns, but I could not attribute them to either analytics service

Google Analytics: unknown
Blogbeat: unknown

Conclusion

I should note that its not an entirely fair comparison - Google Analytics is much more suited to analysing a website rather than a blog; Blogbeat is the reverse. Hopefully Google’s purchase of Measuremap will change this. I am of course viewing it from a bloggers perspective!

Overall, Google Analytics got 16, Blogbeat got 17. I am not that surprised they are that close. Performance is a question I was not able to answer, and this could be key for Blogbeat. They have to maintain high performace for a paid for service. Google gains because it is free, so even though it is not ideal for blogs, it does meet the basic requirements for most users. Blogbeat’s tagging, referral detail and feedburner integration nudges it ahead but overall it comes down to one thing - do you want to pay for it?

[update] Having used blogbeat over a month now I thought I should point out that there does seem to be some issues with its graphs for “this year” and last year” they never seem to appear! - bit irritating that! That probably means that overall Blogbeat is at best equal to Google Analytics - the tagging feature in Blogbeat is the one thing I really love about it though.

This morning, I received an invite to take a sneak preview of the edgeio system. It allows people to post items for sale on their websites. These in turn are picked up by edgeio and then reposted on the edgeio website. It has been launched by Michael Arrington (of Techcrunch fame) and Keith Teare (formerly of RealNames and Easynet).

So what’s so great about that? Well, eBay’s success is its huge community - take that away and why would you sell an item on there? - it would never sell, or achieve a good price! In the same way posting an item on your own website is just as pointless - using edgeio, all items are centralised on the edgeio website as well as your own site, where if successful, there is a large community. Right now, it costs nothing to have it appear on the edgeio website - unlike on eBay of course. Will this change in the future? How will they make their money over the longer term if they don’t? Will advertising be enough? It will need to be easier to use than eBay that’s for sure..

So first thoughts..

well the interface looks clean and crisp and items are easy enough to find. Posting seems to be a different matter though - claiming my rss feed has proven impossible, whether by adding a line to a post or adding it to my header. Nor has my item shown up automatically inside edgeio yet. What’s wrong?

[update] so I was misreading the link I am supposed to enter to claim the blog (it wanted the base url, not the RSS feed). So I am in Now to see if it can see my posts..

[update2] and sure enough as soon as my site was authorised, it picked up the listing. It found the picture and created a thumbnail Having not specifically tagged anything however, this is not altogether surprising. I shall have to do another test with everything properly tagged - I only found the “special” tags afterwords in the FAQs on the site - I think these need to be more prominent on the site - maybe in a publishers section?

[update 3] I thought I should finish off this post as it really lacked any sort of conclusion. Looking at the service more and more, I agree with the guys over at corporate blogging that edgeio is more of a competitor to craig’s list and the classified services than ebay. The major worry for edgeio must be what happens if other providers add the ability to scan for the listings tag. How difficult is this? and if they do what is going to make a user pick one service over another? Right now, ignoring all this, the one thing that bugs me about edgeio is that its not easy enough to get all the information from your post into the right sections on edgeio - its too geeky! Mind you it is mostly geeks who post to blogs anyhow today so maybe that isn’t so much of a problem…

It’s commonly accepted now that for RSS to be truly successful it needs to lose its techy feel and be easier to use - so its good to see that at least a small step has been taken by the Outlook 2007 team by helping to share feeds without having to go into the menus and copy and paste obscure urls that mean nothing to the average user.

Of course the URLs are still there and visible to the user - but its a small step

Can other 3rd party applications interact with this functionality I wonder?

(Side thought: I thought the array of menus has disappeared in Office 2007 - but note the method for accessing the feeds.. tools>accounts>rss>subscription options - looks like there is still some menus about and some depth to them as well!)

I have been complaining constantly about the lack of quality in the market for decent analytics packages for blogs. There has not actually been that much out there for SMEs either - I have of course been spoilt by seeing what the high end analytics packages can do but still..  hopefully this will kickstart the other lower end providers to offer better value Microsoft do not seem to be anywhere near this yet, though maybe they will extend it out of their AdWords equivalent. It will be interesting to see how the higher end players react to this.

Anyhow, there is some hope. Google has launched a free online version of their analytics package which they obtained when they bought Urchin Software. Unsurprisingly they have called it Google Analytics. For me this says a lot about my standpoint on Google - as soon as I saw it I thought “now we might be getting somewhere” - a sure sign that Google is doing something right. I do have one obvious misgiving with Google - how long will it be before I start questioning what they do with all the data on me? the analytics service is only going to add to this data.

The system integrates with Adwords of course and everything seems to be well laid out. This will only come out over the next few weeks as I use the system. There is some interesting things they seem to be tracking - your visitor’s connection speed for example - having implemented this in other packages, it usually means an extra download before the page loads. I wonder if this is how they are doing it or if they have come up with a better way. I shall have to monitor the load time of my pages. Usually this is also an issue for the analytics provider who can have issues coping with the amount of bandwidth required. For some reason the Google Analytics site is very slow today - I guess a lot of people are using it!

One interesting thing is there is no “BETA” sign anywhere! Of course this used to be a paid for service that is now free (It used to be a few hundred dollars). Lets hope they have added extra servers to cope with the huge uptake that is likely to happen at least short term.

The service is not built specifically for blogs - there are no plug-ins per se for blogs such as Wordpress and Typepad etc but I doubt it will be too long before someone comes out with them. For now I will see if my integration works ok..

by the way - do a search on Google Images for google analytics and you get images of urchin logos and urchin screenshots - nothing on Google Analytics yet. I guess there is still a delay for searching on Google

[update] looks like Google is having a problem with load? It keeps coming up and then going down (for maintenance). Not sure on what the problem is but there definitely is one!