What is Digg?84 Comments
- thisalias, on 10/12/2007, -2/+58AT LAST! Something that let's the Webmaster know EXACTLY when his lame site makes you go for the X button
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+52That's creepy, but when it comes out of beta I'm trying it.
- YHCIR, on 10/12/2007, -1/+28You could trace out the words 'this site sucks' with your mouse/clicks :)
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+24This has been possible with javascript for over 5 years now. All the privacy folks have always known this, and disable javascript for many sites (this is what the noscript extension is for).
- Stecchino, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23No joke, this shlomiatar guy submitted this story 4x today.
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21> This has been possible with javascript for over 5 years now.
Five years? Try *eleven* years. Some of this has been possible since the very first version of JavaScript that was included in Netscape 2. For instance, add an event handler to fire when somebody changes a textarea, and load an image with the URI http://www.example.com/snoop?text=[what-the-user-typed]. The end result is you can see what people type into forms even when they don't submit them.
With the extra stuff added in Netscape 3 and Netscape 4, you've been able to do everything this tool does since about 1997. This is just yet another example of people thinking tech that's a decade old is brand new because it has the word "Ajax" in the headline. - pbaehr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18It's a nice idea and all, but what webmaster (no matter how obsessive they are about their stats) has time to watch movies of how people are using their site? How many would you have to watch to get a good idea of the "average user?"
- NetJoe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14and when i show up at the site with adblock, flashblock and noscript it'll show what? a blank page?
- LazArt, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16I like the way they use digg as a free way to make publicity for their company. Very creative! BUT WHERE IS THE STORY? Why is this NEWS ? (Topic: Tech Industry News)
- Jicksta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Ahem,
What about wild use of AJAX requests here? If the administrator is able to see each element the users are *hovering* over, this means there is Javascript code to report this information back to the server.
If this is the case, users' connections could be hit pretty hard just fumbling their cursor around the page. - raindog469, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10OK, this might sound totally stupid to anyone younger than about 30, maybe even 35, but this sounds totally cool... NOT because I want to spy on my users but because I miss the days when I'd be sitting there reading a book next to my Commodore 64 on which I ran my single-line, green-screen, 40-column bulletin board system, and someone would call.
With most of that early BBS software, you could sit there and watch the user log in and navigate the board, and if they were having trouble or something you could break into chat and help them out. Everyone knew the sysop could be watching, but people really didn't write each other incoherent, flaming emails in those days.... and I don't think anyone had thought of sexing each other up over email yet in 1984.
Some people would start entering messages just so they could type, "Hey, are you there? Chat please?" because they wanted to talk but it wasn't important enough to hit the "page sysop" key.
I think that nostalgia is no excuse for hiring some third party to track your web users' movements, but I'd love to set up my own forum software with this feature, kept entirely in-house so I could ensure my users' privacy. Just for old times' sake. - Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"For instance, add an event handler to fire when somebody changes a textarea, and load an image with the URI http://www.example.com/snoop?text=[what-the-user-typed]"
> Who has the time to set all that up manually for every object for every webpage on their site and then go hunting for the images calls in the sever log?
I take it you aren't a web developer? Who said anything about setting things up manually and looking at logs? You can write a single piece of JavaScript that applies a handler to every form on a website, and make the image a PHP script that emails you, writes it to a database, generates a web page, or whatever. It's pretty simple stuff. - Isyso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Second this. Web usage analytics are getting better and better. A webmaster that wants to design his site effectively has the tools he needs--he has aggregated data of user input and response. Instead, this seems a step backward. The 'data' isn't aggregated--instead, it is separated and the webmaster has to sort through each individual 'dataset' to understand the hole picture.
- Stecchino, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Don't know enough about this to digg it yet. It seems very cool for the webmaster but very uncool when it comes to privacy.
- ayavilevich, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11More interesting info at http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/11/watch-internet-users%e2%80%99-behaviour-with-clicktale/
- mookieXL, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6But server's connections too. Some people (including me) tend to make circles with cursor when bored... I guess that's considered DoS from now.
- SweetsGreen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+626 and I ran a bbs in the early 90's... 14.4/2:1 ratio .but it was only open after 8:00pm cause my mom would pick up the phone otherwise.
z-modem for life! - SweetsGreen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Kinda reminds me of the bbs days...It was kinda fun to see which users went straight for the pron section.
- masterkenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This would be great for Information Architects, and projects for revamping older sites to be more user friendly. I can't wait to beta test this!
- o0joshua0o, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I can't wait to start spying on my website visitors right away!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You mean if you can get past the non-existant flow of 90% of sites on the internet?
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4> client side scripts that interact with a remote server rely on the XMLHttpRequest object
No they don't. You can transmit information back to the server surreptitiously in a number of ways. If you read my comment again, I explained one of them. You don't need XMLHttpRequest to do this at all, and following from that, what you say about this only being possible since 1999 is wrong.
> not viable on a dial-up with slow inefficient servers and local boxes running with little memory and slow procs.
I think you're forgetting that you don't need to transmit all the information back in real time. You can wrap it up in batches and send one batch every fifteen seconds or so. And the only stuff that would have been hard on the client memory/cpu even back then is the mouse pointer tracking. - johnkoer, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Just another reason to disable javascript.
- locri, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Although they say that privacy is a major concern of the company, I don't see how you could use this on some sites without recording information that most people wouldn't want recorded. What's worse about it is that it's completely transparent to the user. Even if ClickTale doesn't do it, what's to keep another company from making a similar "service" and possibly hacking someone's website and inserting the required javascript?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Not only that, but tracing clickouts and all kinds of other stuff. Holy CRAP this will be useful.
I'm trying to get in on the private beta. I have a few sites I could TOTALLY use this on. *thumbs up* - Scriptic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Way too many privacy issues, I would only use it for design testing and research purposes.
I don't like the idea of being the user who is watched so I'm not going to subject my users to this kind of nonsense. Especially if its third party.
I'm surprised so many people dug this, its not new and its not a useful implementation, could have severe back lashing from your user community - SweetsGreen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is already very easy to do with AJAX.... I'd imagine that "spoofed" sites will start implementing this soon....Goodbye submit button, hello rise in identity theft.
- RaggTopp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Hey is this an advertisement? The "article" link only goes to www.clicktale.com, and nothing else. Don't Digg this if it's not an article.
- longwang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is neat but I'd like to know when I visit a site if it has this service active.
- SickBoy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Pr0n webmasters should get a kick out of seeing the length of time spent on each pic or vid.
- xqus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ohh.. and it's a hosted service...
But the site does not say it records all keystrokes..
It might be a nice tool, but if you care about your users, leave them alone. - quine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hmmm - as an app owner, I'm not entirely sure I want a third party keeping track of my users sessions, regardless of their intentions to maintain some semblance privacy standards.
- mauriz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Damn, I predicted a year ago that it would happen: http://www.svay.com/blog/index/2005/08/23/297-ameliorez-votre-site-grace-a-ajax
- seventoes, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5'whole' picture.
- zeero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3actually i think this would be quite useful, to see where people click and what paths they take through your site, where their eyes/mouse goes, how well your banners are doing. I would rather watch a movie than sift through logs of text / graphics. This is good for websites that are starting out and want to see how they are doing with their layout.
- awhiteflame, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2But come on? Privacy aside, right now I have tabs in firefox open from 2 days ago. Have I been "recording" ever since?
- stuartcw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I used to name the sysop account on my WWIV BBS "The Eye That Sees All". It was fun to freak out users who were writing a mail to the sysop by bursting into their on-line editing session with a split screen chat.
- TalSchwartz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No, ClickTale records actions and plays-back activity, so your 2-days of non-activity would be skipped over in play-back.
- kLacK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Retail stores have security cameras, guards, sales people, and checkout stands that are all watching what you are interested in. What do you think the VONS club card is for? Does that stop you from going to Walmart for a good deal? They may not be watching a recording of each individual person, but I bet you big chain stores did while in their infancy. Marketing on the web is still very new, and tools like this are not made to embarrass you. In the end, they will benefit the consumer.
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1..They are watching us..
http://blog.clicktale.com/?p=6 - BillDoE, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Let me know if you are using this on your site so I can click some nasty graffiti
- joquarky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So, does this capture when I start to fill out a form and change my mind when I get down to the part where I realize this just means i'm going to get called or spammed by sales people? Great, now they'll have any info I started to type in without even submitting the form...
- IHAEVADD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i dunno, amazing concept but i would feel really weird if i knew every mouse move was being recorded. kinda like grocery shopping with video cameras all over the place.
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2If somebody's fooled by a phishing site long enough to enter their details into the form, they are going to be fooled long enough to hit 'submit'.
- aviat0r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Interesting potential for end-to-end (e2e) user/performance monitoring, evaluating the usability of a website, and simply seeing how the users are REALLY using the website.
- eplawless, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I don't understand the negative reaction. If you've designed a site and want to see how your site in particular is navigated by users, this service looks good. General information about how people navigate isn't necessarily going to solve your individual problems, let alone diagnose them.
- CourageousRobot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Please dig down my previous comment because of the weird formatting - sorry.
I can see how useful this might be for webmasters - especially when trying to make a site as streamlined and user friendly as possible. However, as a user I would like to know if and when a website is using such a system.
Even if the website doesn't deal with questionable content, something about the webmaster being able to see exactly what and where I click and for how long makes me a little uncomfortable - especially when the webmaster will be able to actually WATCH me.
I'm well aware that much, if not all, of what a user does online is logged, but I feel like a disclaimer or notice at the bottom of the page is in order. Just because your can do something without the user knowing doesn't mean you should. - gmurray, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2This is exactly like my senior capstone project.
- Roedran, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Teh Interface BBS Color 64 for teh win... I'm 35, ran it for about 3 years. Large, brown 300 baud modem to start, 5 MB HD set my dad back about $500. Had my own phone line, so I'd wake up at night when people would login, and they chat with them. ;)
- dotdan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Most applications (like AWStats) already track exit pages.
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