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Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
- erichocean 14y agoYes! I've been doing this for awhile. If you feed the data into a Bayesian classifier, you can figure out what kind of user you're dealing with, too.
- seancron 14y agoThat sounds really interesting. Could you describe how you do that a bit more?
- erichocean 14y agoSure. The simplest approach is to use a naive Bayesian classifier (you can find a bunch of open source implementations). In my app, I actually track client-side actions -- essentially, clicks, but with more context. Anyway, you can treat a single user session like you would the text of an email, where the "actions" are the words. From there, all you need to do is capture a bunch of sessions and tell the classifier which users are not strong computer users and which know what they're doing, passing the corresponding "documents". Now you can feed in new documents and determine which of your users know what they're doing, and which aren't really computer users. (It my experience, people fall into one of those two camps.)
- robflynn 14y agoI have done something similar before but also measured which content was being consumed. Are they readers, listeners, or watchers? Eventually, you can pretty easily detect the best way to approach each potential client from a marketing perspective.
- raviparikh 14y agoWe've been thinking about a lot of the same things you mention here. Send us an email at team@heapanalytics.com, I'd love to chat some time.
- Jasber 14y agoLooks very cool––what kind of performance hit is introduced by logging every event?
- matm 14y agoIt's essentially imperceptible. We measured it, and our client-side script introduces a 0.1% CPU overhead.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- raylu 14y agoI don't think anyone is concerned about the CPU overhead. (Also, let's not talk about measuring things without defining exactly what was measured. On a blank page I'm sure your JS runs great.) How does it affect network performance? If I click a link and it takes me to another page, how do you track that?
- matm 14y agoGood point. In terms of network performance, we try to batch events and minimize server requests. For link tracking, our method is similar to how other analytics products track link clicks - we delay the page navigation the min of: 1) 250ms, 2) the time it takes for our server to respond to a click event.
- AaronFriel 14y agoThis seems really interesting, but starting at 250 users per month seems high. I notice the price/active user starts at a penny and falls 60% as the users climb to over 500,000. Would it be possible to create a price option for even smaller companies, demo sites, etc, at a higher rate? Say, what if the owner of a small blog wanted to use this to do really fine grained analysis of users actions but they average 250 hits a day?
- matm 14y agoOur bottom tier (which includes a 1 month free trial) lets you track 2,500 users/month. That said, pricing is really hard to get right. There's basically zero chance we nailed it on the first try.
- web007 14y agoYou definitely didn't get it right. =) That's one of the joys of startup life, A/B test it until you do! Even for a "successful" site (>1mm MAU) $2,000 a month feels insanely expensive. The performance difference between this and GA ($0) is not high enough _initially_ to offset the sticker shock. Look at NewRelic, Tracelytics or even Mixpanel (expensive IMO) for better pricing levels. You've built the equivalent of "hosted snowplow" (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow) with a nice GUI and tools, you should expect to charge something much closer to cost than your current approach appears to.
- stuffihavemade 14y agoIf they can sell successfully at that price point, I'd consider starting a competitor and undercutting them.
- eddmc 14y agoI'm not saying that Heap have got the pricing right but you should absolutely NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find out when you ask your customers. Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you do a bit of searching.
- acgourley 14y agoI'm positive there is a market for it. Unfortunately "capturing everything" has an unsolvable problem beyond capture performance, storage cost and query performance (which are hard but solvable) - it let's you find the outcome you were looking for all along.
- raviparikh 14y agoThis is a really good point - blind data analysis without any notion of multiple hypothesis testing leads to false positives. This XKCD is a great illustration of that: http://xkcd.com/882/ http://xkcd.com/882/ This is something we're thinking about and are definitely conscious of.
- saosebastiao 14y agoNot just false positives in a confirm/deny scenario. It can also lead to overfitting in a modeling scenario. I once created a model that showed very strongly that US/China exchange rates were a driver of revenue. This model was intuitive based on the market dynamics as we understood them, and they helped provide a strong predictive power which helped reduce operational costs. Over time, this model began to be taken as irrefutable truth among quite a few people in the org. Then when the economy collapsed, we very quickly learned that it wasn't US/China exchange rates that was the strong predictor, but rather something else which correlated with those rates. Not only was the model broken, but it had now breeched trust in the ability of model based forecasts. In other words, if I were a business, I would be bankrupt. I think the best value-add that you can possibly provide with your service is a way of helping your customers understand what is meaningful and what isn't.
- foobarqux 14y agoWhat was the actual underlying correlation?
- saosebastiao 14y agoInflation...specifically using an industrial goods index.
- Cakez0r 14y agoGreat job! I think other analytics platforms will start to follow suit as more people start to realise that it's cheap enough to just mercilessly capture every user event. The UI looks beautiful and seems very intuitive too.
- codegeek 14y agoThe demo page (https://heapanalytics.com/dashboard/demo https://heapanalytics.com/dashboard/demo) fails in IE8. Is it just me or IE8 is just not considered by web startups anymore ? Sorry to deviate a little but every time I try to look at a "Show HN" in IE8 (work computer), it fails for about 85% of the time. I could understand that some startups heavily depend on latest browsers but what about others ?
- mbell 14y agoIE8 is a complete mess in comparison to modern browsers. To support IE8 you often have to go through a lot of extra work after the site works in modern browsers to get it functional even if your not doing something particularly complex. At the very least its often a whole bunch of different CSS / replacing CSS with images to get the rendering to look decent. In addition a lot of 'Show HN' posts tend to use 'cool new tech' that just doesn't work at all in IE8. To get it functional you often have to implement an entirely different approach just for IE8. Most 'Show HN' links are MVP products, the devs just decided to release quick instead of spending a few extra weeks dealing with IE8's shenanigans.
- dubcanada 14y agoIE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users. If you have an analytics software that doesn't work in IE8. You lost analytics for 20-30% of your users. And since array.prototype.slice.call is not supported in IE8, this analytics software is about 80-70% useful. And maybe even less if you have a large IE clientele. Seems strange to me that one would limit themselves that much.
- lenazegher 14y ago>IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users. Perhaps in some markets. For one of the sites I write for, it's less than 5% over a large sample.
- mbell 14y ago> IE8 is perfectly fine, No, its really not, its a huge pain in the ass to support unless you handcuff yourself to its limitations. > and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users. Those numbers are wildly skewed by market segment. IE8 is a relic that mostly only exists on corporate controlled laptops at this point. If they aren't your target user, you can pretty much ignore them. None of the sites I work on see over 5% IE8 usage.
- joonix 14y agoDumb question but how does this work? Since Heap captures everything from day 1, all analysis is automatically retroactive. There's no need to wait days for data to accumulate. So it studies my server's web logs? I'm confused about what this means.
- darkstar999 14y agoIt means that if you start tracking on day X, then on day Y you decide you want to generate a certain report, the data is already there, you don't have to start tracking anything new.
- flippyhead 14y agoBut also if you change your page structure your reports might stop working
- raylu 14y agoI assume when you put the JS on the page, it tracks everything. Later, you define "symbols" and that gives you "retroactive" analysis.
- gkoberger 14y agoIt seems it just sends every single event to the server and lets you filter later.
- DodgyEggplant 14y agoPoor man's analytics: events, client side, server side, whatever. Set up a separate DB with one big table, many columns for properties. One server call to write an event (a row), one ajax call to write from the client, throw it wherever you need. A bit of good old simple SQL for queries and reporting, and you are done.
- pc86 14y agoI've often wondered about the efficacy of having a simple catch-all script that just tracks everything a user does on the site. I would think it would pound the database relentlessly under even modest load.
- mcos 14y agoYou could read all the responses into a Queue-type structure and then populate the database in the background.
- stevoyoung 14y agoClickish can do this with GA is you wanted. It's also intelligent with how it routes request back to GA. http://www.clickish.org http://www.clickish.org
- darkxanthos 14y agoOne trick is to not use a database but a flat text file. You can optimize for querying nightly.
- ukoki 14y agoAWS comes into its own for these kinds of use cases - make a lightweight autoscaling events API on Elastic Beanstalk pumping events into DynamoDB coupled with a bunch of workers running at the EC2 spot price sorting and processing these into a traditional RDBMS = massively horizontally scalable events handling for pennies an hour.
- pvnick 14y agoOr a table with two columns, Key and Value. Index by key. Specify keys in code with constants. No need to alter table when adding new metrics.
- orangethirty 14y agoI suggest to test the text on orange button. From "Request an invite" to: "Get exclusive access" "Learn more" "Take a better look" "Find why N is for you" "Join our FREE client club." "Get a FREE account" Note that free account != free product. Just give then login details.
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago"Get a FREE account" Note that free account != free product. Just give then login details. Wow, that's really sleazy. I really hope nobody actually uses that idea.
- orangethirty 14y agoThat is one of the highest converting messages you can put on a button.
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoI think that depends on what kind of conversion you're after. If you just want to harvest email addresses, then sure. If you're looking for satisfied paying customers, this kind of trickery won't work. If you build a button that promises something for free, you need to give something for free — free tier, 30 day trial, ebook, screencast, etc. Having visitors fill out an account form is not a gift to them, it's a gift to YOU.
- orangethirty 14y agoThe issue here is that I'm sharing findings from my own data. This is not me making stuff up. I have actually used this very same button text to increase conversions (up by .04% on a site with thousands of visitors). It was not used to harvest emails. A practice that simply does not work, unless you plan on sending Viagra ads. I don't do such things. If you build a button that promises something for free, you need to give something for free — free tier, 30 day trial, ebook, screencast, etc. Having visitors fill out an account form is not a gift to them, it's a gift to YOU. See, this is where you miss the point. The person is getting a free account. You might not think its something, but there are a lot of accounts out there for which you have to pay. Need to go to Costco? Hey, you have to pay for membership (an account), just to make sure you can enter the store. Free accounts may not be what they used to be (in your opinion), but they are still very valuable overall. Now, of course you are not going to just give them an account. That would be a waste of a good lead. You will then follow up with another offer. Say, pay half-off your service price for the first month. And so on. I know some of this stuff looks rather strange to people here. But the business world is very, very different from programming.
- pnt 14y agoDoes Heap track event streams like mouse position and scrolling? The storage overhead would be significantly larger than instantaneous events like clicks, but this data would be interesting.
- matm 14y agoUnfortunately, we're not tracking those events now, mostly because they don't fit neatly into the event-based analytics model (i.e. they're not as "graphable"). But that doesn't mean they aren't important. Agreed the data can be very useful.
- isalmon 14y agoIt's ironic that on their website they don't have their own code (well, maybe it's on the backend) and use Segment.io + Mixpanel instead.
- enigmabomb 14y agoI'm really excited about this, I signed up. We've been trying to solve this with different things for a while.
- czzarr 14y agothis sounds really awesome if they can manage to stay up under heavy load. It's such a huge pain to set up and maintain the tracking of events in application code. Having everything retroactively sounds positively great.
- soneca 14y agoI liked it very much as a non-tech founder that is not quite sure how to define some events on KissMetrics and regret not having qualified a particular form of sign up as an event before. Comparing prices though, a question: is every visitor of my site a new "user" for you? If it so, then my monthly average events for user would be very low, then an "event based" pricing would be better for me than a "user based" pricing. Comparing prices with KissMetrics, my guess is KM would be cheaper for me with an average of 3 events per visitor. But if your "user" entity doesn't consider, at least, the ones that bounced, then maybe is a good deal.
- raviparikh 14y agoThis is a really good point and something we thought about when constructing the pricing model. Right now we're not a very affordable option for sites with a lot of bounced traffic or low amounts of user interaction. However we'll soon be amending our prices to better accomodate customers such as yourself.
- soneca 14y agoIn my case, if you just say "we don't count bouncing visitors as users", tchanananam!! you just became the perfect analytics tool for me. Even still considering that I have a lot of users that just click once and leave. Please, consider it. PS: "tchanananam" is a brazilian expression onomatopoeia when there is a punch line revelation...
- coolsunglasses 14y agoI plan to make my next website for mainland China, I really need to know that IE is going to work fine here and which versions thereof.
- markus_tipgain 14y agoThat looks awesome! I definitely try it out.
- kybernetyk 14y agoFirst: The service sounds great. Something I would sign up for. But I don't really get the pricing structure: What if I have less then 2500 unique users/month? Do I pay $25? Is it free? If it's $25 what then if I have more than 2500 but less than 20000 users? Is it $150 then?
- raviparikh 14y agoRight now the way we price is pro-rate it for people who are between tiers. For example, if you have 3000 uniques per month, then you'll pay $28.75 ($25 for the first 2500 users, and then $3.75 pro-rated for 500 additional users on the next tier). If you have below 2500 users, you just pay for the portion of that $25 that you use (a site with 1000 users would pay $10). We're updating our pricing page to clarify this.
- pc86 14y agoThank you for explaining this. That's a huge difference that the impression of tiered pricing that I got. Any plans for either a free trial period or a very small (<50 users?) free plan?
- raviparikh 14y agoDefinitely - we offer a one month free trial of the lowest tier plan (2500 users/month).
- TylerE 14y agoI would highly advise you to rethink that. What if we're a larger site? To be honest, your pricing is way out of our ballpark anyway (We're a smallish daily newspaper, ~300k uniques/monthly), there's no way I'd ever get approval for $20k/yr for analytics, no matter how cool, and I'd never get approval to spend $1k+ just to try it. For orgs like us, your pricing seems rather brutal, as we're probably much lower in pages/visit than an "app" type website. (We're at ~10 page views per visit, average)
- dropdownmenu 14y agoAwesome idea to help make capturing data more easy, but how will you deal with the problem of the curse of dimensionality? As you start to capture more variables you data begins to appear far apart leading to less meaningful results. Also, while 'capturing everything' sounds like an awesome idea it can lead to worse performance if you don't take into account that your data now has more variables that can each introduce noise.
- disgruntledphd2 14y agoThe thing about the curse of dimensionality is that it only really kicks into play when you try to put every variable into a model (or when you have low n relative to p, generally). If you restrict yourself to analysing events that you actually care about, its much less of an issue.
- matm 14y ago"Capture everything" need not imply "measure everything." It should imply "measure anything you need to, immediately and retroactively".
- meritt 14y agoWindows user here. The fonts on your site do not render well on Windows machines. I see an increasing number of sites using embedded fonts that, for whatever reason, render poorly on Windows. Please cross-platform test your sites. http://d.pr/i/T7Wq http://d.pr/i/T7Wq Chrome 25 http://d.pr/i/p0AO http://d.pr/i/p0AO Firefox 19
- matm 14y agoThanks for the heads-up, we'll fix this asap. We've run into this issue before, and it seems to have something to do with the font's Unicode values being "out of range" on Windows, whatever that means.
- mattl 14y agoYour move from self-hosted WordPress assets to S3 left some weird stray URLs on your blog that you could fix too... http://blog.heapanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/blog_2-26-13_2.png/ http://blog.heapanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/blo... for example. Now can I have an invite? ;) mattl [at] gnu org
- crazygringo 14y agoFWIW, I've worked on projects where we "blacklist" embedded fonts on certain combinations of OS+Browser -- particularly chrome on older versions of windows. Based on the user string, we would serve up a version of the HTML that didn't request the embedded font, and then those users would see Arial instead of, for example, Proxima Nova. Super-annoying to have to deal with. But it works.
- yareally 14y agoFor what it's worth, they seem okay on Opera in Windows 7. http://imageshack.us/a/img195/3558/fontsn.png http://imageshack.us/a/img195/3558/fontsn.png
- netvarun 14y agoWe use heap at semantics3 and it's really awesome. I highly recommend it. It's really like crack for devs.
- huhtenberg 14y agoWelcome to the blacklist. I, for one, very much object to all my clicks and "activity" on a page being captured and streamed down some black hole for god knows what purposes. Not to worry though - you are in a good company with all other analytics services out there. The only difference is that you are far more open (and proud?) about how obscenely intrusive your service is, so you get an honorary 2nd spot, right after KissMetrics.
- pc86 14y agoI don't mean this to sound as snarky or mean as it probably will. I'm truly interested in your answer. Why should you have the choice to object? What is obscenely intrusive about tracking how you use an application you (may or may not) pay for? I don't see why anyone would have any reasonable expectation of privacy when they're using a service online. Note I am only referring to analytics contained on a single domain. I'm not making an argument for or against services like FB that track activity across multiple domains.
- mchusma 14y agoAgree, was typing my thoughts prior to seeing this pop up.
- huhtenberg 14y ago> Why should you have the choice to object? What? Are you asking me to justify having an option of being able to object? That's a bit too meta, with today being Friday and all.
- emmett 14y agoYou can't opt-out of server-side tracking. They could easily architect the app to require a round-trip to the server on every call (this is how typical early web apps worked). In that case you really don't have an option to object. Does that bother you too? (A service recording your usage of it) Why is measuring on the client-side different from measuring on the server-side?
- physcab 14y agoI imagine that your event feed is going to get pretty unwieldy if you have a thousand events named like the following: div.star.empty button.btn.btn-primary button#nodisturb.muted a.bold-text.text Do you have any ideas how you are going to overcome this? It seems unintuitive.
- matm 14y agoVery keen observation. There are a number of ways to solve this problem. Machine learning helps (there are a few simple heuristics we currently use to sort the Event Feed). But the right interface for defining events helps even more. Sorry for the frustratingly mum response.
- pnt 14y agoWhat if you tracked the event's parents, e.g. button <- div <- .sidebar <- body, etc.? When presenting the events to the user, you could hide generic parents like 'div' and only show interesting parents with ids or classes. To search through events, perhaps the user could use css selector syntax in addition to the current UI you have.
- k3n 14y agoAnyone know of a decent user-tracking / analytics package that isn't SaaS? And isn't log-based, like Urchin (which I just discovered is yet another victim of Googlicide[1])? My app is in dire need of user-tracking and analytics, but it's a self-hosted application and many of my clients run it on LAN segments that don't have WAN connectivity. 1. https://www.google.com/urchin/ https://www.google.com/urchin/
- revorad 14y agohttp://piwik.org/ http://piwik.org/ http://snowplowanalytics.com/ http://snowplowanalytics.com/
- k3n 14y agoThank you!
- namityadav 14y agoPiwik (http://piwik.org/ http://piwik.org/ , GPL 3, PHP-based) is perhaps the best analytics solution that you can host on your own.
- k3n 14y agoThanks! I'll definitely look into this.
- philfreo 14y agoPlease integrate with Analytics.js!
- namabile 14y agoThis looks great. I was looking in the docs and you even have a way to track purchases/revenue and identify users. In addition, the fact that you're able to associate identity data with past actions should help tie users together across sessions and devices, if I'm understanding correctly. From the Heap docs: User properties are associated with all of the user's past activity, in addition to their future activity. Custom user properties can be queried in the same fashion as any other user property.
- randall 14y agoClosing the lightbox doesn't stop YouTube, fyi. Also, can you handle scrolls?
- homakov 14y ago2 questions 1) why would i need this info? 2) how do u track follow/like events
- soneca 14y agoDoes it also offers cohort abalysis based on the time of a particular event (not just a particular property like Browser)? eg. filter everyone that signed up at the first week of January.
- dm8 14y agoI would love to use this product! I was talking with my team recently about having product similar to heap and we've used bunch of analytics products in the past. @Founders of Heap: I would love to do beta test for you guys. When do you guys open the gates for beta?
- endlessvoid94 14y agoWhat are the performance implications on, say, a javascript web application?
- lingben 14y agolooks great but you should take a look at your pricing structure! pricing is extremely difficult so I don't mean to over-criticise, the thing is that you've basically priced yourself out for 90% of potential customers, especially larger ones
- azov 14y agoWhat happens if I'm a smallish site and suddenly get slashdotted / DDoSed? Will I be charged thousand dollars? Is there a way to cap monthly costs?
- matm 14y agoWith the current model, your charges would spike. Which is bad. But we plan to offer caps and the option to auto-sample if you exceed your tier.
- aaronblohowiak 14y agoYour target market is also probably familiar with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- corwinstephen 14y agoPerhaps something like Cloudflare might serve as reasonable insurance against DDoS?
- khromov 14y agoWould also like to know this. Also, I assume anonymous visitors are also users?
- matm 14y agoCorrect.
- anonfunction 14y agoAs a site owner you could easily only attach the JS snippet to people who have logged in.
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- flippyhead 14y agoI love the concept, definitely addresses a pain point in using other platforms. The thing I worry about is when I make some change to the styles or HTML structure of my site I have to now consider how that will break my analytics.
- blakeeb 14y agoReticulating Splines!! Amazing Maxis reference, I'm sold.
- philfreo 14y agoYou should integrate with Analytics.js... https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js
- vyrotek 14y agoLooks great! I'm mostly intrigued by the ad-hoc Group By query functionality. Traditionally that's an indicator of some sort of relational database on the backend, but is that the case here? On the other hand, the dynamic nature of the data makes me inclined to think that they're using MongoDB or something similar. In the past I've had to create similar systems but we denormalized the data coming in based on pre-defined Group By settings. I'd love to learn more about the stack and database used for HeapAnalytics and any other similar services.
- matm 14y agoWe initially tried to build this on Mongo, and it was a huge pain. I'll need to elaborate on why at some point, but the very ad-hoc nature of all our querying precludes any non-relational database from being our store (at least any that I'm aware of).
- vyrotek 14y agoIt sounds like you and I had very similar experience. :) Please do share and elaborate some time. For my past implementation of a similar data-store we had some different requirements that let us cut a few corners. But, if I were to take another stab at it with your requirements then I would try a new approach. I think I would use a single table to represent the 'event' itself and have that table be essentially owned by the customer. This table could be put on a specific shard set aside for each customer or you could just name it "{customerId}_{eventName}" and have a lot of tables. Then each event coming in would potentially perform an 'alter' on the table in order to make sure all custom properties have a column. Are there any downsides to this approach I'm not considering?
- nostromo 14y agoWhy do a HN launch with "request an invite"? This seems like a common anti-pattern.
- emmett 14y agoHow is it an anti-pattern? That's how Dropbox launched, and it seemed to turn out OK for them. Generally speaking if you have a hard-to-scale service (Heap, Dropbox) doing an invite-base system makes sense.
- matm 14y agoOur thinking is that it's an efficient way to grow responsibly while still gathering user feedback early and often. We tried to include as much tangible product as is possible with an invite-only product.
- evolve2k 14y agoFeel free to launch with whatever you like, i just dont agree with calling an invite page 'Show HN' as it's misleading.
- nostromo 14y agoNo worries, it's a cool looking product and I'm sure you'll do well. :) My reaction anymore to consumer "sign-up required" sites or saas "request an invite" products is usually to close the tab, even if my interest is piqued. I do believe that this used to be a powerful design pattern (Gmail, and as pointed out elsewhere Dropbox) but its prevalence has also become its undoing for me personally. Start up founders often worry about becoming too popular too quickly -- when usually they should be worried about not becoming popular fast enough.
- lucaspiller 14y agoMy guess is that most products that do this aren't much further along than a weekend hack. It's pretty easy to throw up a marketing site, and it let's you quickly see if people are interested. Thing of it as a μMVP :D
- smnl 14y agoWhat if my site uses e.stopImmediatePropagation() in any click/event handlers? Would this still be able to capture those events? And if so, how?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bertomartin 14y agoGreat technology, but you guys will know a lot about my business and my users and I'd like to be convinced that you won't do ill with this data...not that I don't trust you, but it would be more comforting if you made your policy towards the information you collect more up-front and clear. But great job.
- krazydad 14y agoCool service, but the pricing is insanely high. My piddly website gets 100k uniques a month, which would cost $600 to track. Kraaaazy.
- tommoor 14y agoInteresting pricing model, it's actually kind of nice to see it segmented by user instead of events - definitely a case of putting the more useful information for the customer first rather than just using events. My first impression is that it would be a bargain for some businesses (low number of users / high value) and far too expensive for large consumer sites with low user value, I guess this is the case for most analytics providers though.
- biolime 14y agoThis looks absolutely amazing, great work!
- gcb0 14y agoHope your sites don't have dialup or mobile over 2G users. ever.
- anonfunction 14y agoWow this is pretty amazing and something I wish google had offered for awhile. The one area where I think your going to need to work on is your pricing. It's just to high for most websites. Of course, if your an elephant hunter...
- bravura 14y agoCan you discuss how you address the "schema-on-read" problem? One of the downsides of the cheap bit-bucket approach of tech like NoSQL and Hadoop is that it's easy to get the data in, but harder to get it out. The producer of the data has less work. The consumer of the data now has more, since there are no longer guarantees on the structure. An emerging 3rd-wave approach is that of an "eventual schema" (see http://arunxjacob.blogspot.com/2011/11/schema-on-read-not-so-fast.html http://arunxjacob.blogspot.com/2011/11/schema-on-read-not-so... by Arun Jacob, chief of data at Disney). But best practices for eventual schema are immature and evolving. How do you approach the problem of getting data out, and allowing people to use common concepts to query their data?
- reddiric 14y agoI'm obviously outside of the audience this is for, and probably most other commenters since only one other person mentioned performance. Perf?? And of course, this follows the "include a script tag to our server" cloud product web API pattern. This isn't setting off giant alarm-bells for anyone else? This gets past the sniff test? The fact that this doesn't fail the sniff test for most people is probably why most web-apps feel like most web-apps feel, instead of like http://prog21.dadgum.com/ http://prog21.dadgum.com/.
- jstsch 14y agoLooks nice. I do worry about the privacy implications of analytics like this. I'm also pretty sure that this doesn't fly in Europe... something to consider perhaps!
- kerno 14y agoLooks like a great tool and I'm looking forward to putting it in action. But, what's with the robot and spaceships blowing up a city in the background of your site?
- michaelmior 14y agoStrange. I was just envisioning a service like this last week. Cool to see someone actually building it. Best of luck!
- shadowmint 14y agoI'd be amazed if we don't start seeing a "Tracking BlockPlus" for this sort of thing, if it doesn't exist already. edit: Sort of already does it seems: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/ https://www.fanboy.co.nz/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]