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swfstats.com

17 pointsbenologist21 comments

The most important information I found on your site was the comparison chart between your service, MochiMedia and HeyZap! - is there any way you can put more focus on that, or mention the comparisons on the homepage?

Otherwise, looks good and I wish you the best of luck. It seems like it will be hard getting traction against the giants but even a small slice of the pie could/should be worthwhile.

I'll see if I can work that table into somewhere more obvious.

I've got incredible traction! I expect April will see me becoming the leading analytics platform by whatever number you want to judge by. While I was in San Francisco I had the opportunity to meet with most of the largest portals and everyone's very excited with what I'm doing... some of the biggest portals are using or testing SWFStats right now and others I met with should start their testing in April.

I've also got a great selection of the biggest/most popular developers as well!

All up I've been just insanely fortunate on that front. To really put it into perspective ... when I posted here 5 or 6 weeks ago asking how to launch a beta I'd done about 200 million events over several months of private beta testing.... this week I will pass 2 billion. During peak hours now I'm receiving close to 900 events per second!

how are you handling the load? web server/db/etc?

I want to have a really cool answer for this like Cassandra and nosql and clusters and nodes and server side javascript and all that cool stuff, but the truth is not that exciting.

I have two servers, events go to log files and log files get processed and put into the db.

Servers are win2003 and win2008, db is Sql Server Express (lol), and webservers are IIS6 and IIS7. Long term I want to get nginx or mochiweb in place for the tracker servers but for now it's beyond my skills and time/money budget to do that.

That's great to hear, congrats then!

Why the focus on games? Our company designs, sells, and hosts Flash sites (several thousand) but they aren't games. This is something we need and I imagine it would be very marketable to design agencies and companies that are building non-game microsites for products, movies, bands, etc.

A tool like this would actually be really great for us ... it's hard to track events like when a user brings up a form (but doesn't complete it) or how deep a user goes into an image gallery.

I'm excited to look at the beta ... looks promising.

Honestly I'd love to move in a lot of directions but for now it's just me so I have to stay focused on what I think is the best path heh.

For the cost you'd charge for tracking "several thousand" flash sites could you employ or partner with someone so that you could take on this extra load?

It's the workload that makes it complicated right now. I'm exploring funding options so maybe something interesting'll happen soon.

The counter is annoying. Maybe choose a better gradient for the button, it looks weird to me. The bright blue title like "Analytics for flash games" is too bright to me. Make the text on the white background bigger. Make the thumbnails clickable to full size images would make this a lot better.

I've made the counter a lot darker so it's visible but not dominant, the text at the top isn't blue / so bright now, also I made those thumbs open up some screenshots.

The counter I think is important, some people have very popular games and it's a very common question... "can you handle my traffic?". The counter helps them see I'm tracking lots of popular games, at once.

Thanks for all your feedback.

It's weird. I have seen so many posts here that says "Review my startup" even though it's only an app/site.

Here you are calling it "my site". I would actually call it a startup.

Well it is a startup, but I think startup and site are pretty much synonymous in these parts.

Since I first posted here about 5 or 6 weeks ago I've been mostly focused on other sides of my startup, but I added a blog a few weeks ago, and then this week I finally got back to the homepage and added the new counter, the feature list on the homepage and the shoutouts to hivelocity and fgd.

What do you think?

The reports look really great, that cannon plunder example report link should be front and center.

Nice idea. I can't comment on the product as I wouldn't personally use it - but in terms of the site.

- the rate counter is distracting. Also the cynic in me checked the source code (and refreshed a couple of times) and I see it's static. That puts me off slightly. EDIT: I would make it static and just say "Tracking XXXXX events - and counting!"

- the slideshow layout at the top is, I think, broken on Chrome (Linux). For example games, levels, reports seem to appear randomly on the left behind the buttons and some of the slide pages drop over the counter.

Otherwise nice design :)

The counter's a mix of dynamic and static hehe. The system doesn't actually update in real time so it looks at what its done at the last update, compares it to the update before, and applies the previous events/second.

It updates 2 or 3 times an hour so although it's never quite right it's never very wrong either - for instance right now it says:

- 1,818,889,440 approximation

- 1,818,804,151 real, as of 13 minutes ago.

- 140 events per second, real but based on the last update not right now

It's processing another log file right now and there's one 1/4 complete file on one server and one 1/2 complete file on the other, so right now the approximation is probably close to 2m events less than the truth.

I'll have to do some more testing to see what the issue is with the stuff at the top. Thanks for letting me know.

I would replace the counter with something like "We track about 140 events per second". That's easier to understand than some counter, where you don't know when it was started.

i think the design overall looks pretty solid. agree somewhat on the counter, cool at first, but annoying if you are reading the text on the page. small note, home page link (logo) is broken if you navigate to the register tab and want to go back home (unless you were doing that on purpose). Like the underlying concept as well. good job

The logos I've been linking to their specific section, for instance the registration page links to my.swfstats where it is located, the logo on the blog links to the blog home page etc.

I'm not sure if either approach is 'more' right, but I have those WWW / MY / etc links up the top (except on public reports, seems I forgot to put them there heh) so people can still get back and forth between the various sections.

Layout is a bit broken for me probably due to my large font sizes - particularly the menus. Kubuntu-9.04 / FF-3.5.8.

http://imgur.com/YlYvI

On http://my.swfstats.com/Register.aspx, at least, the logo does not link back to the homepage.

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