Flash in Web Analytics
I’ve been using two relatively new web-tracking tools for about a month - Mochibot and Google Analytics. Both use Flash to display web site usage - and both are free.
Mochibot - Mochibot tracks both how often your swf is viewed, and, where it is hosted. It was developed primarily for swf games, which are often stolen and posted to different hosts. Lots of games are heavily branded, so where they’re hosted doesn’t really matter. What matters is how many views your game gets, which Mochibot tracks by embedding the tracking code in the swf itself. It’s easy to use - just copy some code into the first frame of your fla. The simple line chart of usage stats is clean and easy to read. Some improvements might be geo tracking and duration (or game level) info. Here is my usage page for findr.
Google Analytics - Compared to Yahoo!, Google uses less Flash and has weaker public APIs. But, they got it right with their new Flash-based analytics tool. This is a good example of a web app that has just enough functionality that building it in Flash is a better choice than Ajax. You could probably do it with Ajax, but you’d be pushing the technology limits, making future upgrades more difficult. Unfortunately, Google does not offer a public view page for the stats, so all you get is this snap. My only complaint is the use of 3-d charts, which I don’t like. What exactly does that third dimension tell me? I can stand on top of the bar charts?
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