Web analytics showdown: Woopra vs. Google Analytics
Do you understand your visitors? Simple information such as average length of visitor stay, peak traffic time, and a user’s navigation path is critical to webmaster success. Analyzing website traffic is not only interesting and fun, but can also boost profits and aid in delivering more relevant content.
There are countless website tracking applications available. One of the most popular is Google Analytics (GA), a beefed-up version of Urchin 6 that has been on the market since 2005. A new player on the field, Woopra, offers several unique features that sets it apart from the crowd. Can it give Google Analytics a run for its money?
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A year-by-year tour of how Facebook has been taking over the world
Facebook is easily the most widely used social network in the world today, an international success. Since its start in 2004, it has grown to more than 300 million active users, which is unprecedented. No social network has ever been as big as Facebook is now.
This post takes a look at Facebook’s geographic expansion from its start in 2004 until today in 2009, showing how its popularity has grown year by year.
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Tweeting about site downtime via Pingdom – the story so far
Last week we made it possible for you to get Pingdom alerts via Twitter, giving you one more way to know if your website is down.
Initially we sent you alerts from a dedicated “alert account”, @pingdomalert, but some people also wanted to be able to have these alerts sent via their own Twitter accounts instead of TO them, so now we have added that functionality as well (i.e. alerts from Pingdom as your own status updates).
Let’s have a look at the different ways people are using these alerts.
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Six ways Apple can make the iPhone more attractive to businesses
Apple’s iPhone has been a massive success in the consumer smartphone sector. But can it mount a serious challenge to phones such as Research in Motion’s Blackberry in the business marketplace? It can, providing Apple is willing to make some changes.
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The rise of real-time search: What Twitter and Facebook integration in Bing and Google means for you
Last week we learned that Microsoft had scored a deal with Twitter and Facebook to allow status updates to be searchable from Bing. Shortly after, Google announced a deal with Twitter as well.
These partnerships are a sign of the growing importance of the real-time web – that smorgasbord of sites and services which allows you to broadcast whatever is going on in your life right now. Other examples include the social network Foursquare, which lets you inform your friends when you’re at a particular venue, and a variety of sites that let you instantly upload audio and video from your phone.
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HTML 5 versus Flash
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is in the process of developing HTML 5, an open standard that could eliminate the need for browser plugins such as Adobe’s Flash video player.
HTML 4.01, the current version of HTML that we use to create web pages and incorporate technologies such as CSS and JavaScript, has been around since December of 1999. The standard has certainly been a huge success, in that it represents a markup language which can work across all browsers and operating systems. Still, there are issues which HTML 4.01 simply wasn’t designed to address.
One of the most significant of these issues is the use of video on the Web.
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How to get Pingdom alerts via Twitter
Yesterday we announced that you can now get Pingdom alerts via Twitter.
So how do you activate those alerts? We have made it very easy for you:
- Add your Twitter username to your contact(s).
- Select “Twitter” as notification method when editing/adding a site for monitoring.
Alerts via Twitter is an excellent complement to email and SMS alerts. It’s yet another way you can get alerted by Pingdom when your websites or servers go down.
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Yep, Zune is in trouble
Microsoft’s iPod competitor, Zune, has been revived with the newly announced Zune HD. But in spite of positive reviews, the overall response from consumers seems to be… well, lukewarm to say the least.
To give you an idea, let’s look at the search volume (via Google Trends) to measure interest for Zune compared to the market-leading iPod over time.
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New! Pingdom adds Twitter alerts
Twitter is an extremely popular service with millions and millions of users, and now those users can get Pingdom alerts delivered right to their Twitter accounts.
Twitter is an excellent complement to Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, and we’re very happy to open up our service to Twitter’s huge user base. Even better, since Pingdom now has free accounts it becomes a great companion to webmasters with a Twitter account. Getting alerted of website downtime has never been easier and never cost less (i.e. nothing).
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Adobe’s bloodless coup
While we were busy working, Adobe took over the Internet. More specifically, Adobe’s software took over just about every aspect of web design and development. Is this really a good thing for web designers and developers? Or for web users? Or for anyone, other than Adobe? My answer is a resolute, unwavering “No”.
Now let me explain why.
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