Great minds think alike. (Or is it, "Fools seldom differ"?)

Just as I was slamming online dating sites for not providing anything close to a real date experience, one of the biggest players — LavaLife — was working on that very thing. (Or at least someone was.)

I logged into LavaLife over the weekend (hey it's research!) and noted that a new icon appeared in member profiles: In amongst Send Mail, Send Smile, etc., there now appeared "Date Me".

My investigation revealed that this feature was just what it seemed: The ability to interact live with other members, and to actually experience things together. (Play games, etc.)

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Google has tossed a new feature into the latest dev builds of Google Chrome. I'm guessing part of Google's "search before search" campaign, Chrome "Instant" loads pages as you type them. Currently only available to the people brave enough to test the advanced options, if it goes widespread, this feature is going to balloon pageviews and possibly result in problems for CPM advertisement internet wide.

This weekend, while playing around with my Chrome dev build, I stumbled onto the about:flags page in an attempt to enable GPU accelerated Compositing. One of the new settings in here is just labled "instant", described as "makes the address bar load urls as you type". From the poor grammar I assumed this would just do more granular URL prediction, but I was wrong...

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People frequently complain about cookies. They don’t like the idea that their actions are being tracked and watched, so they disable cookies outright. The thing is that cookies are really the least of your problems.

Cookies may be a good way to track people, but they are at least a known way. You can clear your cookies, disable them, manage them—and if you know enough, edit them.

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A little bit of futurism for the day. Yesterday I was reading an article on a blog that I've forgotten saying that Google Wave is going to fail as an email alternative. I'm going to go out on a limb here and agree:

Google Wave is going to fail as an email alternative.

But I'm playing with words a bit here. You see, having used it for a while I've come to conclude that it probably was never meant to be an email alternative.

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"The biggest hurdle, particularly with large companies, is convincing them that they don't have to run everything themselves." said Nicholas Carr in the beginning of 2008.

In his interview with Edward Cone of CIO insight he argues that "just as the electric grid [...] led to all sorts of knock-on effects: the way society is organized, the way we think about education, the way we think about consumerism. We'll see similar effects as we're all essentially hooked up to this one huge worldwide computer, this Internet-based supercomputer that all of us share."

10 months later Google is pushing Google Apps, Microsoft has released their own cloud based services, Adobe has Photoshop online.

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compare apples to apples

We have a client whose IT department is stating that AWStats should be sufficient for their Web Analytics needs and questioning whether GA is really necessary

The problem arises, in part, out of the problem that the client has a large contingent in Germany and the IT department has questioned whether GA is in compliance with the "Bundesdatenschutzgesetz" (German Data Protection Law)?

The client is Widgets Inc.!

I am shocked that AWStats has even been compared with GA! AWStats itself does not make the comparison.

I responded along the following lines.

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Caution, this post definitely contains mature subject matter; reader discretion is advised.

Frustration with the tiny little fields in GA, particularly in Goals and Filters and in the inline filter box reached a climax this weekend.

So I wrote this little Greasemonkey script (below) and called it gaDeAnalyse to remove these anal restrictions.

It increases the size of the in-line filter fields and others by 100% or more - guaranteed.

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In writing today's murderous post on Google Analytics Cookies I happened to plug the value 1234567890 into my "Unix time stamp" converter, and what did I find?

Try it:

Timestamp converter

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Its not a bird nor a plane, etc. but it is one of the most intriguing Google Analytics sites I've encountered. Could this be one of the QA sites used by a GA development team?

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Look closely - they're choc-full of info

Last time on "As the cookie crumbles", we featured the friendly cookie monster rescuing an eCommerce site on steroids.

Having been formerly introduced to the cookie monster, we can now talk about his body parts.

While we deal with all the values stored in the main GA cookies, we will show the Domain hash is the ultimate aid to GA QA and quick debugging.

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