RobotReplay Beta is Live | April 15th, 2007
We have finally released the public Beta of our RobotReplay service. What RobotReplay does is it records the mouse movements, clicks, and key presses and allows you to play them back. The service is completely Ajax based with no special plugins. Right now we don’t have much in the way of features but we are going to be constantly adding more and listening to our users about what they want to see.
First take a look at Andre’s screencast.
Otherwise, just sign up now and see what your users are doing.
April 16th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
This is very cool and the future of analytics. I signed up but the site seems to be a little slow right now.
Where can we find the terms of service governing what you are doing with the data, how you are protecting it, etc.? I think these should be airtight, as you have to overcome a pretty big comfort obstacle with your customers’ users: the perception that their “uncommitted” client-side activities are their own and that this is just a keylogger.
Any company utilizing such a service would do well to be very explicit and delicate about the fact that they’re using it, and what they’re using it for - to the level that I would expect any site employing this technology to display badges indicating exactly what is being captured, i.e. keypresses, clicks, gestures.
One thing you might consider doing is allowing customers to choose which classes of events they’re interested in. For example, “I care about only events for CSS selectors”. The finest grain might not be needed, the privacy concerns might be mitigated, and I’m guessing your servers wouldn’t mind the lightened load, either!
I will say that this might be less scary (at least for a site operator) if it weren’t a hosted service. Any chance you’d ever license the code?
April 16th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Sorry, my example got cut off. It should read:
“I only care about (list of events) for (these CSS selectors)”.
April 20th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Hey Evan, thanks for the comments!
We are certainly being very careful with the data that we store and it is stored completely anonymously. In some cases we certainly don’t think that people should be using RobotReplay for situations that sensitive custom data is being entered into a web page. Of course, on SSL the user will have to accept the unsecure data request. We are currently reviewing our privacy policy and certainly going to be in touch with all of our users to help them communicate to their users what RobotReplay is doing.
As for your other suggestions regarding customizing the types of interactions that RR will capture, we are already working on some very interesting stuff in terms of allowing users to customize the captures / playbacks through an API.
Finally, yes we are going to move to a model where the code can be licensed. For operators of large sites that want to do more recording and reporting than the free service allows we will be providing a ready to deploy version that can be licensed.
Thanks for the comments and everything should be running much more smoothly today!
Dave
April 23rd, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Nitobi is an intriguing product.
BTW, can I come over to your office so I can click the link for Andre’s screencast at
http://localhost:3000/screencast/robotreplay_betascreencas2.html
and have it work right?
Thanks!
David P.