Tell HN: 360 Voltage is out of Beta (10 PRO accounts to giveaway to HN)

360 Voltage is out of Beta, it's a set of online marketing tools that my agency envisioned for in-house use and decided to turn into a freemium web site along the way, which we now use in house (natch). To say that HN has been good to me is an understatement, it's an oasis of rational thought and discussion in a wasteland of online social media sites... (</digression>)

So I've got 10 yearly 360 Voltage PRO account subscriptions ($149/ea.) to give away here to some devs who would really dig into the site, use the tools, and then give us ongoing feedback as we iterate like mad and try to populate the blog with useful content. Obviously, that's all unenforceable, but you get the idea...

Once again, I'm giving away 10 yearly pro account subscriptions to HN users to help us prime the pump on our freemium web site, which is a search marketing tool set called 360 Voltage. If you're interested:

1) Create a free account on the site. (360voltage.com)

2) Leave an initial impression of the site in this thread

3) Shoot me an email via wade [at] voltagecreative [dot] com with a sentence or two about how you'd use the tools. Also include your 360 Voltage account name in the email so I can flip it to PRO status on the back end.

I'll post, "Thanks guys, they're all gone" in this thread once they've been spoken for. (If I get more than 10 requests, the PRO accounts will be awarded subjectively/pretty-much-randomly by me.)

So far the site looks pretty decent, the tools are somewhat standard so far but show a good basis on which to expand. I haven' run all the tests yet so I will see how it does with the RANDAL and others.

Hey Wade, thanks for this. I registered and the site looks very good. I like the simplicity of the tools. Tried a quick test on one of my sites and liked the way voltmeter displayed the results. I'd be happy to provide more detailed feedback as I spend more time looking at the other tools. Cheers!

Checking it out now. One thing. When I click on the ? next to the "targeting score link" it just takes me to the top of the page. The tool tip is "How is this calculated?", but I'm not seeing the info after clicking the link.

I'm particularly interested in the keyword distiller.

edit: I forgot to mention that I really like the design. Nice and clean.

I really like how you score each section seperatly. It inspires me to work on scoring better on these sections. I have used the hubspot grader tool before, but I do prefer yours. It seems faster too.

Looks great so far. I love the UI on the Voltmeter. I love the idle detection too ;). Everything seems really well laid out. I can't wait to start running this on our other domains.

Looks really polished. I'm really impressed when a site can come out of the gate looking so good.

Hi Wade, this looks great! I gave Voltmeter, Randal, and Distiller a go and they all produced clean, easy to understand reports. This product actually comes at a great time because I was just about to get rolling on some A/B testing and SEO tweaking of a site of mine.

One weird quirk, on the Distiller page, when I came to that page from the Voltmeter, I found the site url I was checking was populated over the top of the instructions in the input box. (Win 7, Chrome 4.0249)

Wow! I'm in prelaunch development right now but in the next month or two I've got to kick in the marketing, seo, advertising, copy optimizing, etc. I was kind of dreading spending lots of time inefficiently and not getting much out of it, but these tools look like they could really help me focus and measure my efforts.

The search engine ranking tracker would be especially useful to me. However, when I run it I am seeing significantly different results than when I go to Google directly (with personalization turned off, i.e. logged out). I'll send you an email with the details.

Wade, looks promising. I've used SEOmoz tools before, curious how this stacks up. The historian seems interesting, but could raise privacy concerns (guessing it's using browser history via visited links). Would be nice to see an FAQ on exactly what's being sniffed for.

Good luck.

Randal (keyword monitoring) and Historian (user history/analytics) are fantastic tools -- I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Well done, and looks nice too :)

Wade - so far so good. I love tools that require minimal input from me and perform some magic. Will be in touch.

The UI looks great! I really like how simple it is to get around and how you're notified when something is going on.

My report was a little slow and it let me know I could come back to it at any time. (it wasn't obvious at first)

I set the account up for my wife's retail site online and the reports look pretty close to what we document now.

I think I'd have trouble explaining how to use the Darwin tool. Maybe have some more information on how to set that up for people who are a little less technical?

Hi Wade,

This looks like a good site. I checked out the Voltmeter test and it gave me some info I already knew, but also some information that might help with site ranking. So it seems like you're on the right track!

I'll definitely be checking out your site more in-depth moving forwards!

Btw, I enjoyed the little messages that appeared while I was waiting for the report to run (e.g., "Web crawlin' ain't eeasy!"). It may be a bit trivial, but I got a kick out of it anyways.

its the little things we put into this that make it nice :)

"A unique site analytics tool that can peek into your users browsing history and tell you where else your market is gathering online."

How would you peek a users browsing history, and if you did manage it how legal/unevil is that?

http://www.stevenyork.com/tutorial/getting_browser_history_u...

Basically, you read a link's color in the DOM and you can tell if it's been visited. It does spot checking, not full history browsing.

It's an old and well documented exploit that never has been, and probably never will be, fixed due to it's intrinsic nature to the web...

We can't actually peek into anyone's history the way a layman might take this statement. What we can, and do, do is load up a list of links and see which one's have been visited. The freemium accounts just load up our default list of the top 100 sites online and looks for hits. Pro users can customize their check list to ad competitors and other URLs of interest.(See timdorr's response below.)

A tool like this good for finding out if your users are more of a MySpace or Facebook crowd, more of a Yahoo or Bing crowd, etc... for market research purposes. If you have a PRO account and can customize your list you can ad direct competitors and see which ones get cross-shopped with your product the most online, etc...

Example usage: Let's say you want to run an ad on one of the top tech blogs. You could plug 100 tech blogs into this tool for a week and see which ones your crowd reads the most. Now you know a good place to advertise to get a second brand impression.

Addressing "evilness" - I don't consider it any more intrusive than any other type of analytics. And it's also completely disabled with Javascript turned off. So, as always, users are welcome to empower themselves.

On another note, I've been waiting to have this conversation with an informed crowd, what do you guys think about using this for the purposes stated above?

I'm of the opinion that it's similar to cookies from a privacy perspective.

When a non-technical user hears about the concept it sounds a bit scary, and it may have potential for abuse. However, used properly I don't think it is overly intrusive.

Personally I place high value on knowing my customers and I would really like a comprehensive solution to get that knowledge. To be comprehensive it would have to include techniques to compel users to fill out surveys, participate in usability studies and other direct interactions in addition to the passive observance that you do. And yes, knowing the visited links is helpful in my quest, it's just not the whole story. The way I see it, I want either an ready-to-use building block to roll my own, or a wholes-story thing, but I have no use for a wholes-but-different-story thing.

I understand this would be a different product/service from the one you are making, but you may find this perspective valuable.

Also, lose the kittens. It's the wrong kind of childish.

Thanks for sharing this tool. Turns out I had a free account already, must have come up across it before. I'm particularly excited about Randal, which solves a (relatively) simple problem (keyword monitoring) that I haven't seen done well yet. The Voltmeter report took quite a while to complete, but other than that the UI seems intuitive. Look forward to getting a chance to play with it more, I'm working on the SEO efforts at Optask (http://www.optask.com).

This is... pretty awesome. I've only tried the Voltmeter so far, but what I really like is the education that comes with the results. You guys have done a really good job of explaining each factor in plain English. It's very easy to understand.

I love this site. Please think of adding catchpa for signup. Its very easy for a script to scrape and create quite a number of accounts. Very useful guide to improve search results.

* Voltmeter - How is the keyword targeting decided? I got unexpected keywords for my site.

* RANDAL - I used to check where my site appears for given set of keywords. It solves the problem automatically.

Haven't checked other tools yet. Will be doing it soon.

Hey, I like what I think this site is supposed to be. I think I broke it though. I have two reports generating in my account somehow and so neither of them are coming through.

Edit: OK, one came through.

Yes, we can run multiple reports, but doing so doesn't make the first one complete any faster. ;-)

Thanks guys, they're all gone. I appreciate all the feedback and would love more. I'll sort through the ton of emails I got and notify everyone who sent me an email of their account status.