Woopra State of the Union Address for March 2009
Hello everyone! What a beautiful March we have this year! The lights on the servers are shining, the bandwidth is flowing, and this month our wonderful developers have all sorts of goodies in store for the Woopers!
The New Woopra Application is Ready for Testing
As many of you may have already noticed, Elie released the new Woopra 1.3 Release Candidate – which means this is a pre-release version that is mostly stable but still undergoing final testing before we make it a mandatory build and push it out to the broader Woopra user base. The new 1.3 incorporates many, many improvements and additional features, and we’ve got a few tricks still up our sleeves in the next couple of weeks before we push out the desktop client to all users.
New Web Stats Coming Soon
In addition to the new desktop application, Jad has been hard at work preparing a brand new Web analytics version which will initially be available via the Member’s area where your Web sites are listed. This version is great for those times you cannot get to your desktop version, but it will also be making it’s way into the WordPress and other plugins so it can be embedded in your own site. Oh, did I mention the new Web stats will be live and incorporate all sorts of new features plus one HUGE surprise! Stay tuned…
Updated Web Chat Coming Soon
We’re also working on completely updated Woopra chat functionality which is going to allow more browser types (Chrome, Flash, etc.) to take advantage of the live chat features, and which will also set the stage for multi-user chat awareness. It is also going to allow for JavaScript customization to change the look and placement of the Chat request window in the client’s browser.
Service Expansion and Paid Plans
We’re starting to finally turn our sights on the development of the billing platform. We’ve had far too many people asking us to please roll out the billing system so they can upgrade to a higher level of service. While we are anxious to actually start earning a little money, it was more important to us to complete the bug fixes and feature requests that have been on the docket for some time before asking our loyal users to pay for service.
We’re beginning to make some very limited services available to select clients who are in need of extremely high usage accounts. If you have a very high volume site and you’ve been waiting patiently all this time, please contact us about our Enterprise accounts and we’ll be happy to start the process rolling on getting you set up.
Please keep in mind there is limited availability at the moment, so it’s going to be first come, first served. And you need to be willing to help us work a few of the little quirks…
Advertising with Woopra
We are re-vamping the advertisements we had in the previous desktop application. We want to make advertising present, but not intrusive, but we felt our first go round was not what we ultimately wanted. The concept behind the updated ads is that we will use only text ads instead of graphical ads, and we’ll display them in a small but attractive ticker at the bottom of the client which is always visible in the free version, but which might be able to be hidden in paid versions of the service. As with much of what we do with Woopra, this will evolve over time as we find the right mesh for our advertisers and users.
We’ve had a lot of inquiries about getting ad placements in Woopra lately, and we’re working on our Ad platform and rate sheets. If you are interested advertising now please let us know and we’ll talk about the options as we finalize our program.
Well, that’s all for this month. Thanks for your feedback and help in making Woopra better and better. Stay tuned for more big news coming next month! And as always, I invite you to follow me on Twitter to get all the latest breaking updates.
Champing at the bit…
I would love to get more than just country specifics about my visitors, places like Canada and USA are huge, knowing the province/state those visitors come from, even the city, would be so much helpful
hey John, I for one like the new client, it has more details. And I will be waiting for the surprise in web stats. I have a comment on the new client, why is the page rank checker on the homepage instead of showing the Google PageRank and Alexa Rank on the website’s details, for example under the Today Page Visits and Pageviews? It would be visible the whole time with the statistics.
@miroslavglavic – We’re all in agreement with you here. Unfortunately the database we have doesn’t append state and province information so we can’t really get that data right now. We are looking into a couple of solutions for that however, so consider the request duly noted!
@Amgad – There is a pretty simple reason for not putting the Alexa / PageRank stats right into the main view… we would probably get banned from using their service. ;-) Since every page on a Web site has a different PR, we’d have to be running queries against Google and Alexa constantly. Right now we’re seeing over 50 million page views per day, and the vast majority would require a lookup each day even if we cached requests for a period of time.
John
I would really like to see the ability to move the order of sites listed in the sidebar around, so I can have my important sites toward the top and the lesser important below.
How about a full screen listing of all your sites, little square boxes dynamically sized depending on how many sites you have – like a dashboard look of all sites with traffic bar and current visitors listed – preferably allow to drag these around too for the best placement.
Thanks guys, glad to see things are moving in the right direction!
–Tone
Miroslav Glavic,
The live visuals of Woopra attracted me, and will keep me using the service. I am fully aware that I have been using 1.2 beta and 1.3 RC1 which are NOT the gold version, BUT on substance, Woopra has a long way to catch up to Google Analytics.
I started using Google Analytics shortly after 1.3 RC 1 was released and several of the issues I noted in 1.2 Beta remained unresolved. Once again, I know 1.2 and 1.3 are NOT gold versions, and know that Elie and Jad are young, but capable developers, however, my two weeks with Google Analytics have illuminated the gap between its accuracy and Woopra’s.
Google Analytics is very granular and corroborates my manual observations of my site’s statistics. I will use Woopra for visuals and toy factor. I like the real-time aspect, particularly the alerts of live visitors, but for accurate statistics, I read Google Analytics every morning.
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