Written on November 25, 2008 – 10:36 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
TwitterCounter is one of the projects that got its start in The Next Web Incubator a few months ago. It has been growing madly and we are very proud that is doing so well.
Last week Joost de Valk contacted us with a question: “why doesn’t TwitterCounter offer an API?”
Well, the only reason why we didn’t offer it yet is that we (Arjen mainly) had been completely focused on keeping up with growth and making sure the servers weren’t crashing on us. But a few weeks ago we upgraded our servers and the service was doing fine so I decided to start coding on the API right away.
TwitterCounter in Mint
TwitterCounter in Clicky
Within hours it became clear to me that building a complete API was actually more difficult than my developers skills permitted me to comprehend. I contacted Joost again and asked him what he needed exactly in an API. He responded with a list of features that made me desperate! I could never built all that on short notice! But he ended his note with a sentence that made me smile.
He said “… but if you give me the root password for your service I can just build it for you. :-)”.
I quickly consulted Arjen and we both agreed that it would be an interesting idea to just hand over the keys to the castle! So I emailed Joost our server details and just hoped it would all turn out okay.
It did.
Today we are proudly presenting the TwitterCounter API.
Joost de Valk has built a Pepper for Mint and Sean Hammons has integrated TwitterCounter into Clicky. If you have ideas on how to use TwitterCounter Data for your service don’t hesitate to contact us.
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on September 6, 2008 – 4:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Being a stats-addict sucks. You experience highs and lows the whole day, which causes unpredictable mood swings. Though when you’re running a project that actually does well, it doesn’t hurt to check it every once in a while. For me, checking The Next Web stats sort of works like a happy-pill, I guess. So I was glad to hear that my favorite statistics service Clicky (review here) will officially launch an iPhone version of its stats dashboard on Monday. And guess what? It’s already available on m.getclicky.com!
When opening the page in your iPhone, you’ll see an overview of all your web sites. Click on one, and you can choose whether you want to check the stats of “Today”, “Yesterday”, “Last Week”, and some other date options. Then a screen with a summary appears and the options to see the “Visitor tally”, the “Action tally”, and the “Recent visitors” (There are actually a ton more options, just scroll down). To give you an idea of the eye-candy, you can see our recent visitors at the right.
Although Google Analytics is the standard, I use Clicky for my sites. I believe smaller companies are more likely to innovate and the launch of the iPhone app proves that (No Google Analytics app so far).
Disclosure: we’re involved in a affiliate program with Clicky. Which we wouldn’t be if the service wasn’t that great. Oh an by the way, there are no affiliate links in this post.
UPDATE: Clicky has now ‘officially’ launched the App.
Written on February 19, 2008 – 10:48 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you can tell by the widget in our sidebar, we ‘use, approve and recommend’ analytics service Clicky. And not just because they have an affiliate program. The service offers insightful statistics, especially because visitors have ‘names’ instead of IP addresses. Moreover, we not only want our number of visitors to look good, also the way they are presented must be pretty slick. Clicky fulfills that need with a cool-looking Web 2.0 design. We’re not alone in this, as co-founder and lead programmer Sean Hammons told me that the service is monitoring traffic of 200,000 web sites. I wanted to know the story behind this upcoming analytics tool, so I’ve asked Hammons a couple of questions.
Hammons started Clicky as an internal project at his last job: “We wanted to analyze how each individual visitor was using our site, not only per session but also any user’s entire history with a simple click. There are some products that track individual visitors, but in my opinion they’re all ugly or crappy. Plus, we wanted to integrate it with our user’s account information, not just IP addresses, and nothing did this that we could find.”
So instead of just accepting the fact that the perfect service didn’t exist, Hammons started working on it himself. “I wrote up the initial version in a few hours and called it Clicky without even really thinking about it. We were tracking what people were clicking on, so the name it seemed obvious but also funny in a kind of not-really way. It immediately helped us a great deal with figuring out how our users were interacting with our site, and over the next few months I continued to improve it, until it became obvious that we should be making it into a commercial product.”
“The name Clicky seemed obvious but also funny in a kind of not-really way”
That was October 2006. Hammons launched the public beta six weeks later at clicky.roxr.net. He admits that the service was ‘fairly limited’ at first. “But as we got feedback I quickly filled in some obvious features that weren’t there, and over the last 15 months I have worked on it more than 50 hours a week to make it into what it is today. Over 25,000 sites have registered at GetClicky and through the partnerships and licensing deals we’ve made, we’re monitoring traffic to a total of more than 200,000 web sites.”
When I asked Hammons how he experienced the quick growth of the last years, I suggested it may had been a roller coaster ride. Yet as Clicky ‘never had any lows’, Hammons doesn’t agree with the metaphor. “It’s all been a blast. We’re very profitable, have zero debt, and own 100% of our business. What’s not to love?”
Maybe the blogpost by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore in June 2007 titled ‘Bye, Bye Clicky’. According to Cashmore, Mashable had ‘outgrown’ Clicky. By that time, the company tracked 7,000 active websites, but Mashable was accounting for more than 10% of all incoming traffic. Clicky was ‘in excess of their limits many times’.
Hammons: “At that time we only had one server. Since then we have increased our capacity considerably and have four database servers rocking out behind the scenes. Mashable started using the service again about 2 months ago I believe.”
There’s a few key features that Clicky still really needs
That being said, what are the plans for the future? “There’s a few key features that Clicky still really needs, like localization, goal tracking and campaign tracking. These are all coming fairly soon. We’re dedicated to making the best analytics products on the planet and will continue to improve it for a long time to come. We work out of our homes but are considering opening an office and hiring a third employee. We’re also considering a few other side projects we might work on, to get a bit of variety going on in our lives. I love working on Clicky but after 15 months non-stop I’d like to take a small break and work on something else too.”
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
