Just Add Social Networking and Profit

December 20th, 2006

Just Add Social Networking and Profit

About a year ago, I tried out MyBlogLog. It’s one of several web stats packages oriented towards blogs and other dynamic web sites. Over the past year, I’ve tried several of them, including BlogBeat, Performancing, Google Analytics (not for blogs, particularly), 103 Bees and HitTail.

I rejected MyBlogLog because compared to the others (Performancing being the best for blogs, Google Analytics being great for most sites and HitTail having a great ’stream of referrers’ model), it’s not very good. Unlike most other stats sites, in order to get real time information, you have to pay. The free version sticks you with yesterday’s data. There are, as far as I can tell, no charts (I like charts), and the data presentation is pretty shoddy.

Yet, MyBlogLog has been turning up all over the place over the past month or so. I couldn’t figure it out until I revisited the site.

They’ve added a bunch of social networking stuff: groups, contacts and so forth. Here’s my profile, yo. And here’s a widget that’s actually pretty cool:

Last week, they added support for MySpace.

Unfortunately, their core functionality–providing information about how people use your website–doesn’t seem to have improved. They may very well succeed in spite of this. Maybe they’ll abandon the whole stats thing altogether, and just focus on what seems to be working for them: building a distributed social networking platform (to quote ~~Michael Arrington~~ Steve Poland).

UPDATE: Jeff from FeedBurner writes to tell me that FeedBurner acquired BlogBeat, and recently rolled out their web stats functionality. Yet another chunk o’ javascript to add to my poor blog templates.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

brem
December 20th, 2006
4:13 pm

that’s me up there!!! :)
What I like about this is that generates visits based on who visits your blog. So when someone visits my blog, even without commenting, I can go visit their blog.

Synergetic!

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Scott Rafer
December 20th, 2006
5:57 pm

Hi Darren, long time…

The reporting isn’t really all that separable from the community piece. They feed each other pretty nicely. Fortunately for us, some bloggers take the opposite stance from yours. They want only the reporting data that is the most useful: “which of my links was the most successful.” And, they seem to want it presented in a minimalist fashion. Every time we check, the answers come back that same way.

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darren
December 20th, 2006
6:03 pm

Scott: Hi! Long time indeed. Yeah, I’m probably a power user, and somebody who’s comfortable (and, shamefully, really enjoys) wading through web stats data. That said, I’m not a huge fan of Google Analytics–they’ve really over-complicated their interface, and their choice of language is pretty confusing.

Why isn’t the reporting separable from the social aspects of the site? I may not have fully grasped the product when I tried it a year ago, but I didn’t see much community stuff at that point. Wasn’t that the reporting without the community?

You’re obviously right to do what your users want, but I’m surprised there haven’t been more requests for data visualizations like charts, graphs and so forth. I’m not talking Visitor Ville here (which I should have mentioned in my list above), but doesn’t everybody like a nice pie chart?

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