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I was asked if it’s possible to track who is looking at your Myspace profile. The short answer is yes. But you can't get very specific information. I'll answer this question in a Myspace context, but the ideas apply elsewhere too.

Looking at my stats here at KnowingArt.com, this seems to be a new, hot topic. Myspace users are now more sophisticated. They are confronting classic problems for the first time. I've never talked about Myspace trackers here specifically, yet there are many people coming here looking for that information. This tells me a few things:

  1. There’s a demand for social networking statistical tracking.
  2. There probably isn't a free Myspace tracker available yet.
  3. Users aren't finding the tools/information they need at Myspace.
  4. The "business" of social networking is evolving.

If you are a programmer that already has a Myspace tracking system, let me know. I might post your link. There are a number of generic third-party stats trackers out there that will show you where your traffic is coming from. But Myspace will censor these URLs if they look too "cgi". For instance, "www.knowingart.com/track?referrer=whoever" would probably be censored. It looks suspicious. Myspace probably censors javascript too. So, would-be tracker programmers will need to be creative.

For very basic Myspace stats you can hotlink an image on your domain’s server from your Myspace profile. Then just check your server stats for that image to see which Myspace pages are loading your image.

Example:

You're an artist and you photographed a lovely new drawing. You upload that drawing to your server (in my case: knowingart.com) and you paste the new drawing as a comment into your friends' profiles. If you have 20 friends, your drawing will be loading from your server each time anyone visits any of your 20 friends. Some people don't get many comments so your drawing could be up for months. If each of your 20 friends average 200 views/day, your drawing gets hit 4000 times/day. Some of those 4000 hits might be the same person reloading the page. Or a software robot.

You can't assume that all 4000 people looked at your drawing, but at least they had an opportunity to see it. Now, on your server you can look at your stats (any generic logfile analyzer will do) and you can see the links of the profiles that are hitting your page, probably sorted by # of hits. Unless you are coding your own stats, the link won't say "300 hits from Joe, 250 hits from Jack." But if you click the links (assuming that you are still signed into Myspace) you can mentally match the person with the URL. This is not to say that you know who looked at your drawing. This only tells you the profile page where your drawing was loaded from your server.

Because Myspace censors HTML, (a good reason not to use it) you'll need to get fancy if you want to take your tracking a step further. Code a script that looks like an image to Myspace, but actually it’s a PHP script with a .jpg extension.

Example:

www.knowingart.com/whatever.jpg could be a PHP script that outputs a .jpg image. But before the script displays the image, you can capture some useful server "environment" info. Before I gave up on Myspace, I was planning to code an art gallery so that I could get a variety of stats on each drawing, ranking them by popularity. If you are selling products on Myspace, (this is against the TOS, but people do it anyway) you could get individual stats for each product: hits/day, CTR, referrers... I would not recommend selling products on Myspace--you'll realize how much time you wasted when your account is suspended for violating the TOS. Myspace is selling its own ads. They don't need you as competition.

As far as translating referrer info to a Myspace username, that’s crazy. You would need access to private cookie information. Even it was technically possible for a third-party, it’s none of your business. And possibly unlawful. On the other hand, advertisers that are working with Myspace directly will have access to specific user-profiling metrics. "Show me CTR this week for single Christian females in Texas." The most disturbing part of this is that Myspace can show different advertisements to different people looking at the same page. You have no idea what is really being advertised in your name, on your profile. If you search the old posts over at PaidContent.org, there’s a sound clip of Rupert Murdoch hinting at the profit expectations surrounding Myspace user-profiling.

Many of the Myspace pages have URLs that use numerical ID #’s. So, it’s going to be difficult to get a nice looking, coherent list of referrers. A referrer link from a comment is going to look different from a link on a friend grid page, even if both links are from the same profile. Does Myspace care? Don't count on it. If you try to code a Myspace script that will fetch an ID# to convert it into a username, you can bet your IP will be blocked, sooner or later. One time I was curiously looking around Myspace, studying the structure of the URL’s. I was looking at the profiles for users ID #1 and ID #0. I was jacked into Matrix. Myspace user ID #0 was a young guy, typical profile, nothing too strange. But I got the impression that he was working for Myspace--maybe a security expert? Shortly thereafter my account was (temporarily) deactivated. Coincidence?

In conclusion, I wouldn't bother coding anything Myspace-specific. But a more generic and "discreet" image stats tracking tool will be more generally useful in situations. Especially in cases where cgi code could be eyed with suspicion.

Top recent searches: "is it possible to track myspace" "myspace tracker 2010" "myspace referer" "whos looking at my myspace" "how can i find out whos been looking at my myspace profile" © 2011
(mardoumBdus)

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