The latest from TechCrunch
- It's Time To Disqus Our Community
- Google Wave Still Dead, But Funeral Won't Be Until 2011. And Data Export Coming.
- Reinvigorate.net Offers Powerful Real-Time Analytics, HeatMaps, And A Touch Of Creepy
- New Site Renders Tech Reporters Obsolete
| It's Time To Disqus Our Community | Top |
| Perhaps you’ve noticed that a couple days ago we flipped the switch to enable the shiny new commenting system here on TechCrunch powered by Disqus . So far, the feedback has been very, very positive — and we’re pleased with how well it’s performing. But Disqus is just one step of what we need to do. As many of you are well aware, the commenting situation on TechCrunch has been completely out of control for a long, long time. That seems to be one unfortunate side effect of when a site gets large enough (see: YouTube and Digg for other great examples). But we also realize that things don’t have to be that way. Some popular sites have very good comments (see: Hacker News and Quora for good examples of that). We’d like our comment section to be useful too. So we’re going to try to do something about that. As I said, Disqus is the first step. The service offers very nice set of tools for on-the-fly moderation. We’ve also worked with them to do things such as make it very obvious when an actual TechCrunch writer is responding to a comment (I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that something like a quarter of commenters claiming to be us — or at least me — were impostors over the past few months) — you’ll see our names in bright green when it’s actually us. But as we’ve learned over the past several months, comment moderation is a big job. So we’re going to hire someone to help us with it. On the face of it, this may not sound too attractive, but the job we’re creating is about a lot more than just moderation. It’s also about responding and engaging with our readers in an actual conversation rather than shouting matches about nothing. And it’s not just about our comments. It’s also about interacting with our community on all the various networks where we have a large presence — Twitter, Facebook, etc. We’ve already gotten a number of resumes for this position when we quietly announced it several weeks ago, but we wanted to open it up one more time as we’re finally looking to hire this person soon. Some quick requirements: you need to be based in San Francisco and willing work out of our office in the SoMa district. But believe me, you’ll want to. We’re a fun bunch. Prior experience is obviously a plus, but not necessarily needed. If you’re interested, please email: tcsocialczar [at] gmail.com Maybe it’s too lofty of a goal to think that our comment section can be something like the one found on Hacker News, but it’s a good goal to have. As all of you know, the fact of the matter right now is that the vast majority of our comments are pretty worthless. It’s so bad that I use an extension to turn them off most of the time. But at the same time, we have an incredible readership at TechCrunch than spans the tech universe — any beyond. Whether you’re Mark Cuban or unknown-but-devoted reader, if you have something worthwhile to say, you deserve to be heard. One final thing: Just to be clear, we welcome dissenting opinions. What we don’t welcome is bile or nonsensical comments that add nothing. It’s going to be a work in progress, but we are working on it. [photo: flickr/E raPhernalia Vintage ] CrunchBase Information DISQUS TechCrunch Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Wave Still Dead, But Funeral Won't Be Until 2011. And Data Export Coming. | Top |
| Yes, Google Wave is dead — but it won’t fully flatline until some time in 2011, Google confirmed in a post today. Well actually, their words were that wave.google.com (the front-end product) “ will be available at least through the end of the year .” But yes, you can probably expect them to shut it down sometime in 2011. But before that happens, Google is also promising that “ there will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year .” So if you have been one of the seemingly few users who has been using Wave a lot, there will be a way to get the data you created out of it. It’s not yet clear what format this will be in, but we’re going to assume some sort of standard export file type. Google also says they’re continuing to look “ at ways to continue and extend Wave technology in other Google products. ” Does that mean the new social product known as Google Me ? We shall see. They also reiterate that they will be “ open sourcing more of our code and providing support for our loyal users and Apps customers. “ Finally, the team thanked the outpouring of support from projects such as savegooglewave.com . Sadly, it looks like the nice words and nearly 42,000 thumbs up won’t be enough to stop the execution. [photo: flickr/ mendhak ] CrunchBase Information Google Wave Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Reinvigorate.net Offers Powerful Real-Time Analytics, HeatMaps, And A Touch Of Creepy | Top |
| If you’re running a website — be it a world-famous news portal or a personal blog — there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time poring over your stats. There are of course plenty of services available to help with this, including the hugely popular Google Analytics. But the older systems tend to have lengthy lag times before they’ll generate a report, whereas services like Chartbeat show things as they happen. Given how quickly things spread across the web these days, the future is clearly real-time, and today sees the public launch of another powerful analytics service called Reinvigorate.net . After logging into the site you’ll see an overview page which displays the number of currently active visitors, active pages, and a graph of your traffic over the last few hours, all of which update in real-time. If you’d like to drill down more, you can jump into a separate Traffic tab, which includes stats like your daily and monthly visitor counts, bounce rates, and a breakdown of how much traffic each page is drawing. At this point the site doesn’t offer much in the way of a real-time visualization of your traffic the way Chartbeat does, but the company says that it’s coming in the future. Reinvigorate.net also offers heat-maps, which allow you to see where users are clicking across each of your pages. These have been available through other services, like Crazy Egg , but the Reinvigorate team believes it’s the only service to offer both heat maps and live analytics in one package. The main overview page also offers “Live Visitor Tracking” — a list of the users currently browsing your site, listed by their username. This is where Reinvigorate.net gets a bit creepy. If you’ve integrated Reinvigorate’s analytics tools, you can track the browsing habits of each of your visitors across your site, labeling each user with the name they used to register or to leave comments with. You can use the real-time overview to see who is currently browsing your site, or you can jump to the ‘Detailed Activity tab’ to look back at any user’s browsing history, including they’ve time spent on each page. This information can of course be very helpful for site owners, and it’s been technically possible to do this kind of tracking for quite a while. But most systems don’t make it this easy, and it’s a bit unnerving. For example, to test out Reinvigorate.net I was given the test account ‘techcrunch’. You can see my browsing history as I bounced around the site in the screenshot below: The service has an unusual backstory. It was created as a side project back in 2002 by Sean Mcnamara, who was a longtime MediaTemple partner. In 2008, MediaTemple acquired it through its ventures arm mt ventures , and Mcnamara began working on it full-time. The service has only been available with an invite until now, but has still grown to tracking 15,000 sites and 500 million pageviews over the last 30 days. Reinvigorate.net runs $10 per month for its beginner package and ramps up to a $20/month Pro account, with custom plans available for “ultra-high traffic sites”. If you’d like to try it out there’s a free 14 day trial. Also see Clicktale , which is significantly more expensive (the “small site” plan starts at $99/month). CrunchBase Information Media Temple Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| New Site Renders Tech Reporters Obsolete | Top |
| Why do I get the uncanny sense that a lot of technology bloggers will soon be out a job? In the grand tradition of single serving niche sites like WhatthefuckshouldImakefordinner.com and Whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com comes Itsthisforthat.com , an easy way to generate responses when you need to explain to your parents, relatives, etc why you’re eating ramen for breakfast, lunch and dinner instead of going to law school. “So, basically, it’s like a new social platform for government corruption …” From site creator Eric Kerr : “Basically, my friend Ben Gilbert and I attended the demo presentations of Startup Weekend this past weekend in San Francisco. While we were watching the demo pitches, we noticed that every one of the 10 pitches was an X for Y. We threw this together while the demos were going on and showed it to some people at the event and they loved it.” We love it too. Almost as much as our job security. Headline inspiration: Jason Kincaid | |
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