You can read about it here: http://www.voipbloggen.dk/woopra-trafikanalyse-afmystificeret It's in danish, but to sum up:
I love it for a number of reasons, but mainly because it demystifies web analytics, showing people instead of trends.
I fear it because it shows faces behind cold numbers, and gives Woopra the possibility to put faces to IP's. Although their/your :-) privacy policy looks very humane: http://www.woopra.com/privacy
Thomas,
If it makes you feel any better, I'm the CEO of Woopra and I even fear the stats a bit myself.
I guess the only consolation is that Woopra is really only bringing to light what has already existed with the big players like Google and Amazon. In theory, they can track your true identity and everywhere you go across the web. And with those guys, ALL of your data is tracked in one big database.
By contrast, at Woopra we are keeping each sites stats in a seperate DB in order to have physical separation of data and purposely not track users from site to site.
It is sort of a scary "big brother" thing to have people know who you are and how often you visit. But sometimes you might actually want people to know you're checking in... and when you don't it's as simple as clearing the cookies.
Take care,
John
Don't get me wrong, I'm loving Woopra a lot :-) But no roses without thorns. If you could read the wonderful tongue of Danish, you would see that I give credit to the fact that you're the first ones (to my knowledge) that brings datamining to the people to this extend.
I don't fear you yet, but I fear what the market will do to you because you're going to be a hit, and be sold for millions and millions and dollars. There's no doubt in my mind about this.
Regarding the databases:
I've had trouble figuring out if YOU are correlating data across sites, for internal usage. I can see/hear in the video you did with Neal Cambell (http://www.vimeo.com/839783) that you aren't bringing this to market, but are you doing this for your own purposes?
Thomas,
We are NOT aggregating any data. The amount of data we are gathering is massive, and processing all of that across sites would be quite a task for sure.
Now, why might we want to do something like that? Hmmm. Perhaps we might have an opt-in service that shows the top articles across different sites or something like that? I don't really even know yet.
Regardless, your fear of any one site having such a massive database of information is warranted. I'm even uncomfortable with it. But hopefully that makes you feel good. We are as worried about the information falling into the wrong hands as anyone else.
One thing I can tell you is that we will not be retaining the logs for long periods of time unless people are willing to help offset the cost of long term data storage. So there will be some safety from that regard.
John
Hi John
Thanks a bunch for your answer.
My fear is on a decline ;-)
Thomas
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