Secrets

At work, people (and programs!) using email who mistakenly type subjects containing the word “page” into the “To:” or “Cc:” line instead of the “Subject:” line end up sending me email. Given the nature of our business, the word “page” comes up frequently in emails.

I never reply to these, just delete them. But I see some strange stuff.

At a previous company, a co-worker had the user name “asdf” .. he once got a confession of infidelity. Delete!

Back when the Web was young, Brian Behlendorf had (if I remember correctly) nowhere.com. He got lots of interesting email to user ”nobody“ at that address. And would reply to it.

Secrets

Cookie Monsters et al

cookiesNow don’t get me wrong, I think Jupiter does good stuff and I like Eric Peterson. But when I keep reading things like Jupiter made the first splash about cookie deletion and even Eric saying that others are validating his findings, I just scratch my head.

At Y! we’ve been discussing this issue for a long time. Not because we’re super-insightful, but because back in the spring of 2004 (almost a year ahead of the Jupiter study), there was a study done by newspaper research firm Belden Associates that says .. wait for it … some 40 percent of users clear their cookies at least once a month.

Does it matter? Not really. Just that it’s not new news at all, so I’m baffled by the recent storm of discussion. Kudos to Jupiter for bringing it to the attention of the wider industry, because obviously it wasn’t well-known previously.

Cookie Monsters et al

We Can Agree on a Metric, but is it Good?

Last week at Emetrics I was speaking with a company doing vertical search. We discussed metrics like number of “next page” clicks, time to first click, and lots more, in order to measure the user experience. Metrics often take the place of real data, e.g. for inferring things like relevance of the search results.

So, thought experiment: Visitor A does a search, clicks on 15 links. Visitor B does a search, doesn’t click on any links. Visitor C does a search, clicks on 2 links. Average clicks per search is 5.66. Which visitor had the best experience?

The answer is that it depends on what the search term was.

So, it would be misleading to compute an average, and compare each result against the average. If you categorized your searches into terms like information, browsing, and general, you could group your searches and compute your metrics by category. You’d want your information searches to have low clicks, and browsing searches to have high clicks.

We Can Agree on a Metric, but is it Good?

The Technology that Wouldn’t Die

Guy Creese has a post about Datanautics, the company formed from the ashes of the old Accrue Software. Having done some detective work, Guy notes that analytics pioneer I/Pro is offering support for Datanautics customers, and have overlapping management teams.

I know Datanautics had been shopping the technology – last week, multiple vendors at Emetrics told me they’d been approached. So it looks like I/Pro ended up with it.

In 1996 when we were pitching the original business plan that would become Accrue, people would ask “how are you going to compete with I/Pro?” At the time, I/Pro was focused on services and auditing, not hard-core behind-the-firewall analytics, so our answer was that they were different beasts. Fast forward 9 years and there’s your answer…

So what happens to Datanautics? Last week two different people told me the company has changed direction, changed their name, and has something new in the works that leverages the existing technology. I was told the new name, but I don’t remember it.

I’ve long thought the technology underlying AccrueDatanautics G2 could be repurposed for lots of other large-scale analysis, the only sticking point was developing the expertise to build a solution using the technology. Have they done it?

The Technology that Wouldn’t Die