Akvelon (a technology consulting firm) unveiled a new real time web statistics service for online retailers who service thousands of customers daily. The idea for the service came from the request of a client who wanted real time statistics on its' online business. Akevelon chose Microsoft to partner with because of it's ability to process and analyze data on the go without having to store it first. The result: business can now process online traffic and analyze it's statistics, advertisements, downloads, etc in a cost effective way.

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Facebook is has been the dominant social networking site in terms of traffic and revenue, and now is topping other charts as well. Web search is "the terms people use either to find information or navigate to websites." Facebook has recently surpassed Amazon, Walmart, Netflix, and Google and has become the most common brand name in web searches according to reports from Hitwise.

It is interesting that users still search for the term "facebook" instead of typing in the site's web address into the address bar, which to me seems like it would be much quicker.

This article is relelvant to web analytics because of the web search data that was collected by Hitwise to make this report.

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Overstat is a web analytic and visitor intelligence company. It announced on 3/30 the launch of its web analytic.Many says that Stat will change the web analytics environment.

Unlike legacy web analytics tools, majority of which require users to have web programming skills or other technical knowledge to use them effectively, the company, Overstat focused on non-technological users. The product allows non-technical users to see the web page context of the analytics and readily understand the significance of the information and help them to make better decisions about their website.

This interesting competitor will change the environment dramatically.

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We know now that a popular and thriving business model is that of selling data. Companies who aggregate this sort of data can figure out a scary amount of information on any one person. But now it seems like companies such as Aperture are also pulling data from companies like Experian (credit reports), Acxiom (marketing services), and Nielsen's Claritas (buyer behavior) and then combining that with Datran's database of e-mail addresses. They can then put consumers into neat, marketable, and useful demographics.

Basically the difference between Aperture and every other data collecting company is that it can pull massive amounts of "sensitive" data from offline sources to market to consumers. At hearings in early March, the Federal Trade Commission discussed whether this offline material should be kept out of marketers hands. Congress is debating whether this area needs some, or any, restrictions to protect privacy of consumers.

Companies can, and more commonly will, integrate the information consumers sign away when they access the internet and information from credit reports as well as sexual preference, organizational affiliations, and lists of friends and family members.

The original article is here.
This is part of EBSCO Host on the library's website.

Here is an interesting article on what can be with public information on social networking sites. Like using web analytics internet entrepreneur Pete Warden used public data (your "info" from your Facebook) to track locations of users and locations of their friends. Check out the cool visualization and full article here.