Competition

In which I feel truly validated.

I know work on Kownter has stalled – there are other things afoot – but then an “excitable nerd” with 22,000 followers on Twitter says this:

What if website analytics software didn't take your users data to line their pockets from advertising? What is website analytics software was simple and trustworthy? Here's my new idea (and if this gets enough traction, I'll build it) https://t.co/TzWZUNfcXe pic.twitter.com/U9yhLWU0iq

— paul jarvis (@pjrvs) April 16, 2018

And suddenly the race for simpler, more privacy-aware analytics is on!

Who am I kidding? Paul and his companion Danny will do a WAY better job than I will. BUT, I have a working prototype so maybe I’m a nose ahead and this will inspire me to keep going. [Update: I’m not a nose ahead – Danny already has a prototype too!]

Thoughts on Paul’s mockup:

• There’s return visitors and journey tracking – so presumably they will use cookies? Or some other cleverness that they’ve thought of but I haven’t. This is all walking a line between end-user privacy and functionality. Decisions will need to be made.
• There’s no charts! Which I find interesting. I had at the back of my mind that I would add them later on. I like the up/down arrows comparing the previous time period, and YES, I was definitely going to do that!
• There’s “Signups”, which is also interesting. I’d been toying with the idea of event tracking. I’m using JS tracking code, so no reason I couldn’t make an API for tracking simple events. OR you can get a ratio of people visiting a form page vs people visiting a thank you page, for example. But this won’t work in more dynamic, JS-driven apps.
• There’s no sign of user agents/browsers. I currently store the raw user agent string, but finding a complete, accurate and up-to-date mapping of UA strings to browser names hasn’t been easy. This is something that an organisation the size of Google can put resources into but I can’t, sadly. Perhaps I should drop it? But it’s data I can get and it can be useful so…hmm… [Update: Daniel Aleksandersen pointed me at Piwik/Matomo’s Device Detector]

I absolutely, 100% applaud the fact that someone else is having a go at building this. Go and sign up for their announcements if you’re interested.