I just saw an advert for Google Analytics in my GMail the other day that mentioned something about a new industry benchmarking feature. I knew immediately what it was.
The idea is that you take the analytics information from all the sites using Google Analytics and generate some benchmarking data by industry and apply it to your stats. That way people who use Google Analytics can see if they have an unusually high bounce rate compared to their peers or if they have a really low pages per visit stat. Right now when people look at their Google Analytics information - aside from their past experiences - they haven’t really got much to go on in terms of what a good bounce rate or pages per visit value might be. This way one can actually compare with others and then prioritize what needs to get fixed based on what is most out of whack compared to others in their industry.
In the case of Google Analytics, I think that this sort of feature could really change analytics from being a private sort of thing to becoming something that, dare I say, a social network could build around - who wouldn’t want to be featured on the Google Analytics homepage for having the best web stats?
I had this idea a while back and I think it can be applied to a lot of different industries outside of web analytics - sort of like PayScale is doing with salary reporting - but of course an idea is nothing unless you can execute
Hopefully we can apply the same sort of idea to RobotReplay in the future.
It is nice having time to actually look at my email and check out what has been going in the world! Having been thoroughly swamped with preparing JavaOne / XTech talks, conitnuing product development and support, and flying half way across the world I finally have a spare moment to report on a few things of note that happened this past week at Nitobi. Luckily I can lift most of it from Alexei
First of all we have released some new support for Complete UI on Java. This coincided with our presence at JavaOne of course. The new stuff includes support for Eclipse, JSP taglib, servlets, Struts and more. Check it out here. Alexei even created a way cool video overview and posted it here - he has such a good screencast voice!
There is some other video to watch as well and that is a video interview Andre did for WebProNews about Nitobi and RobotReplay.
The Enterprise Ajax book is now available on Rough Cuts. The other thing in this vein is that it looks like we will also be producing some video content to go along with the book - should be interesting to see how that works out!
Next week, I will be in Paris to give a presentation at XTech on declarative Ajax programming - 9am Thursday May 17. I will talk about some of the driving factors behind declarative Ajax and have a few examples / demos. XTech is a really good quality conference I think and there are lots of interesting people going to be there - it should fun!
Some other Nitobi people (Jake and Brian) are going to be down in Portland for RailsConf over the Canadian long weekend (ha!). Hopefully they will find some good Rails action and have a few nice Portland brews!
RobotReplay is continuing to evolve and we are getting very close to moving some of the service over to EC2 and getting all the servers organized in preparation for a few way cool new features. Last week we got around to implementing a few new things as well and started to purge people’s old sessions to help keep things working smoothly
We also have a few cool new projects and products on the go that we will be blogging about soon!
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.
