Response To A Breakup: Blogbeat
To my true love, Blogbeat:
I have always been in love with you. From the moment I set eyes on you, I knew that you were the one for me. I suppose it is poetically ironic that you should choose to leave me the week of Valentine’s Day.
I’ve seen this coming for a long, long time. Ever since that day last July when Tracy Hailpern from Feedburner called me to be part of the press release, the one where Feedburner announced that it was buying you and your love — I knew this day would come.
Oh sure, “We’ll still be friends,” you say. That’s what all my other lovers have said, and where did that get me? Do you think they call me and talk to me, or measure my blog?
What am I supposed to do tomorrow morning when I wake up and you aren’t there to tell me who visited my blog using the term “Price of Sitecatalyst” from King of Prussia, searching on Google even though this is his third visit? (I always thought King of Prussia was a shopping mall.
You’d be awed at how many “price of SC” searches I get.) Do you expect me to use MeasureMap? No, I know that you expect that we really will be friends and that we’ll be a threesome with Feedburner. But you know, I have my own special relationship with Feedburner and you don’t really measure up, no pun intended. The one thing you did so well, matching up the geo-location with the browser string identifier with the referrer and the search term and permalinks visited — that’s gone. You were a real man with me, Blogbeat. Now that you’ve married Feedburner, I need a calculator to figure out how old those visits from 23,532 seconds ago really were. And just to make this hurt even more, you aren’t offering cookies to exclude myself from the data.
Yes, I know, I could use Google Analytics. I’ve been readying myself for this breakup for a while; I installed GA on my blog last summer; I even coded onclick events for my feeds so that I could tell which buttons people preferred. (I found out that they like the big orange feed button the best.) Looking at aggregated analytics is wonderful for my customers who have large sites, but Blogbeat, you just don’t understand. I only have about 235 subscribers and 100 visitors to the blogsite itself each day. I love to scroll through and look at who came and where they landed in an effort to figure out, did the reader find what s/he was looking for? Now that you’ve disaggregated the searches from the landing pages, those data are gone.
When you asked me to be part of your beta test, I knew this was the beginning of the end. I hung on to every word you said, ever chance I had to be with you. But did you care about me? Did you incorporate any of my suggestions into the gamma product (whatever comes after beta)? In addition to being your lover, I am a web analyst, but you never cared.
In fact, the only person I can say anything nice about here is Zach at Juice Analytics, who finally showed me how to express my misery. Of course, it’s always easier when you are doing the breaking up, like Zach is.
Maybe I’ll be better off without you. I won’t check my analytics all the time. Sure, they’ll be interesting, but they won’t be fun anymore. Not without you.
Love Forever – I’ll never forget you
xoxo
