The sheer numbers of pageviews and visitors were gigantic, in November, Comscore reported:

News Corp.’s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo, according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace’s growth was 2% over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.

38.7 monthly billion pageviews is roughly 900,000 pageviews each second. Later there was talk about MySpace inflating the number of pageviews, while Yahoo tried to lower the number by using AJAX to load new content into pages (which obviously doesn’t qualify for a page view).

Now, the February numbers are somehow modified to adjust for this new situation, according to this article on “Mashable” by PeteCashmore:

The problem, of course, is that MySpace is a pageview factory, while Yahoo is trying to improve the user experience through the use of ajax, which reduces the number of pageviews per user. Stat companies rarely admit their stats are wrong, but ComScore had the guts to change direction: we got a press release to say they’ve created a new “Visits” metric for measuring user engagement.

They’re now measuring the “average visits per visitor” and unique visitors. They’ve also been fairly apologetic to Yahoo, emphasizing the effect that ajax had on Yahoo’s rank in particular. And the change in positions is pretty startling for the month of February 2007: Yahoo comes first using both visit-based metrics, while Fox/MySpace drops to 6th place in uniques during February 2007. It comes in 7th for average visits per visitor.

An interesting lesson here, I think:

User experience is a unique measurement, not related to any traffic measurement. More pageviews does not necessarily mean better user experience or more satisfied users. In my opinion, go for the best user experience, the best user satisfaction, and don’t worry about other metrics.

More info:

• USA Today: ComScore: MySpace tops Yahoo in November
• The Next Net: Page Inflation at MySpace?
• Mashable: MySpace vs Yahoo – ComScore Backs down
• Justaddwater.dk: Definition of User Experience Revisited

Technorati Tags: yahoo, myspace, traffic, analysis, visitors, pageviews, user experience, uxp, web statistics, stats

The report finds, among other things, that the majority of people browse maximized or very close to it. That Mac user have bigger screens, but their browser are the same size as on any other platform. And, in order to support 95% of your visitors, you need to design for a maximum size of 776x424px.

Actual Browser Sizes – The Movie

Thomas Baekdal also produced a short movie explaining how this enormous feat was achieved. It’s a fun and interesting watch – even for the non-geeky of us. Let’s just say that a lot of monkeys would make all our life’s easier ;)

Technorati Tags: usability, screen size, screen resolution, browser, web design, window size, web statistics, thomas baekdal, movie, monkeys, monkey

We discussed the ups and downs of newsletters, meetings, knowledge sharing groups, wikis and blogs. We talked about if we should share our thoughts with the whole world or if this should just be another one of those “Capgemini-eyes-only” things – Well, to make a short story long, we fairly quickly decided to share our thoughts with the whole world and start a blog – well it was also the hot potato at the time I guess … it still is ;). I had some leftover domains from the dot-com era and asked Jesper if we could use justaddwater.dk as our base of operations – he quickly agreed.

A slogan, a WordPress installation and a quick shopping spree over at iStockphoto later we where settled, and so it all started with a statement in our First Post. Later on we went back and revised our blog purpose.

Along the way…

This has been a very exiting journey. We have been all over the world (well USA, UK and India to be precise – but it sure feels like it). In the process we’ve ended up meeting a lot of very friendly people (both IRL and online), and this has definitely been the best part of the experience.

It wouldn’t be the same without Dan Webb, David Black, David Heinemeier Hansson, Eric Reiss, Jakob Nielsen, Jakob Skjerning, Jared Spool, Joe Clark, John S. Rhodes (I heard from Jesper that your wife is pregnant – Congratulations!), Line Pedersen, Luis Villa, Obie Fernandez, Olle Jonsson, Steve Krug, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Thomas Visby Snitker, Trine-Maria + many, many more (this list is far from complete!) … and not to forget, of cause our boss Jacob Strange (you need to get a blog!) who lets us blog and fool around with new and exiting stuff in Capgemini.

Statistics

I think that I’ll end this birthday post with some statistics… In the beginning I tried to publish statistics every month. But for some reason 5 months later I stopped – So here is a quick roundup:

Ranking

Just a couple of days ago Google gave us a very nice birthday present, they bumped us from PageRank 4 to 6 overnight, so this is now our current Google Page Rank:

Thank you Google :)

Visitor count

Since we started tracking with Google Analytics we’ve had about 25,000 visitors, with a combined average of about 75 per day. The last half year that number has been closer to about a 100 unique visitors per day.

All Time Top 5 Stories

1. Live search explained
2. AJAX businesscase: Reduce development costs and increase usability
3. How to indicate required or optional form fields
4. AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value
5. Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool

Source: Google Analytics

Browser Versions

Browser Versions, Year 1 – Source: Google Analytics

As the graph clearly shows, over half of our audience is using Mozilla Firefox (56.45%). Next comes Internet Explorer by Microsoft with 29.39%, Safari by Apple with 6.60% and Opera with 4.57%. The long tail includes Camillo, “Mozilla Compatible Agent”, Konqueror, Netscape (still alive and kicking), Galeon, gzip, HTC-8100 and WebSpear.

Other graphs

We have to thank Max Kiesler for writing his Round-up of 30 AJAX Tutorials. As the graph below shows this generated over 7% of all our traffic (not counting all the spin-offs!). Besides that Ajaxian is responsible for over 10% and Google and Technorati provide us almost 9% of our visitors.

Visits by Source, Year 1 – Source: Google Analytics

The next graph is simple. A quarter of all our visitors are returning to our blog after visiting before. I don’t know if this is a lot or not compared to other blogs, but I’m happy to see that we do not bore all our readers ;)

Visits by New and Returning, Year 1 – Source: Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: birthday, anniversary, justaddwater.dk, web standards, usability, blog, blogging, weblog, web statistics, ajax, graphs, wordpress, google analytics, Max Kiesler, Dan Webb, David Black, David Heinemeier Hansson, DHH, Eric Reiss, Jakob Nielsen, Jakob Skjerning, Jared Spool, Joe Clark, John Rhodes, Line Pedersen, Luis Villa, Obie Fernandez, Olle Jonsson, Steve Krug, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Thomas Visby Snitker, Trine-Maria

Popularity

After a record high visit count in February with 575 unique visitors we have gotten a slightly steadier stream of visitors browsing our blog each day. The general picture does of cause reflect when new and interesting posts are published, so the graph goes a bit up and down:

Visits and Pageviews, March 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Top 5 Stories

After Max Kiesler published his “Round-up of 30 AJAX tutorials” on the 15th, Jespers old post about Live search got a lot of attention. The list also contains two newcomers – Number 4 and number 5:

1. Live search explained (961 visitors)
2. AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value (262 visitors)
3. AJAX businesscase: Reduce development costs and increase usability (195 visitors)
4. New Google layout more usable (182 visitors)
5. Windows Vista setting new standards for Find-as-You-Type searching (137 visitors)

Source: Measure Map

Browser Versions

Here is the ever popular browser version stats battle with Firefox leading big-time with 56.45% over Internet Explorers 29.39%:

Browser Versions, March 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Other graphs

Visits by Source, March 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Visits by New and Returning, March 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Geographical reader location, March 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: justaddwater.dk, statistics, web statistics

Popularity

On Wednesday the 8th of February Jesper published a story he had been working on for quite some time. After quickly being picked up by the popular website Ajaxian, the 2 days that followed was the most visited days we have ever experienced, topping Thursday with 575 unique visitors (according to Measure Map) – thank you guys :) … These couple of days makes the rest of the graph seem like nothing:

Top 5 Stories

The number one story in January must see it self reduced to a 3rd place this month. This month the two top stories have one thing in common: AJAX. In both cases mainly because the stories quickly was picked up by Ajaxian. Here is the list:

1. AJAX businesscase: Reduce development costs and increase usability (1152 visitors)
2. AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value (699 visitors)
3. One of four web users are disabled users (329 visitors)
4. Live search explained (285 visitors)
5. IE7 beta running side by side with IE6 (177 visitors)

Source: Measure Map

Browser Versions

Nothing big has happen on the browser front this month. The only trend that seems to still be going strong is that Mozilla Firefox is getting an even bigger marked share each month. The losers this month are Internet Explorer by Microsoft, Safari by Apple and Opera by… ehh Opera Software ;)

Browser Versions, February 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Statistical numbers

Other graphs

Geographical reader location, February 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Visits by Source, February 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Visits by New and Returning, February 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: justaddwater.dk, statistics, web statistics, Analytics, Google Analytics

Jeff Veen sent out an email to all Measure Map testers (including justaddwater.dk). From the email that Jeff sent out:

So I said there was news, and here it is: I’m writing you to announce that Measure Map has been acquired by Google, effective today. For the near term, you will see no difference in its operations. In the not so distant future, you can expect great things from this acquisition. We couldn’t be happier to find such an ideal home for Measure Map, and are thrilled at the possibilities.

While this is a milestone for all of us at Adaptive Path, this sale does not affect how we operate, nor will it alter the structure of the Adaptive Path organization. Adaptive Path is still here, stronger than ever, and it will be for a long time to come. Above all, we remain committed to the principle that superior user experience inspires innovation and creates business advantage.

Previously, I have complained about lacking features of Google Analytics, when Jared Spool suggested us to take a look on Measure Map. We’re using both Measure Map and Google Analytics on these pages, and it’s surprising how different they are.

But there’s surprisingly little details about what will happen. A number of questions arise in my head:

• Will Google improve Google Analytics by adding features from Measure Map?
• Will Measure Map and Google Analytics co-exist as different products aimed at two different target groups: Bloggers vs. commercial sites?
• How can Jeff claim (in the email) that Adaptive Path continues in the same spirit, and on the other hand say that he’s now a Google Employee? (I wonder if wearing this is too much for my first day at Google?)
• How will Adaptive Path spend the money earned? I kind of think these guys are not just retiring. There might be something else on their radar?

And of course the obvious:

• How long will Measure Map stay in closed alpha-testing?
• When is it ready for beta, or even ready for public launch?

Also, I think it’s worth noting that it’s only 3 months since Google Analytics launched. At that time, attention was drawn at whether MeasureMap had a market when Google Analytics were free. Techcrunch Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map is a good example.

It seems a very smart move for both companies. So I guess the old saying goes: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

More info:

• Google Blog: Here comes Measure Map
• Adaptive Path: Measure Map Goes to Google
• Techcrunch: Google Buys MeasureMap

Technorati Tags: web stats, web statistics, measure map, google analytics

More readers

As mentioned above, January was the month where we really got noticed around the world. Just see the rising graph below where we top around Thursday/Friday the 26th or the 27th with over 130 visitors:

Visits and Pageviews, January 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Top 5 Stories

One post in particular has drawn a lot of attention. Part of this is of cause because of its provocative claim that a quarter of all web users are disabled. We have gotten a lot of feedback on this and many people feel that the use of the word “disabled” is to much. That besides we should not ignore the fact that the story has many interesting points that we should keep in mind when designing and developing new websites. Anyway… less talk more numbers:

1. One of four web users are disabled users (238 visitors)
2. AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value (217 visitors)
3. Live search explained (160 visitors)
4. Windows Vista setting new standards for Find-as-You-Type searching (109 visitors)
5. Google Analytics trick: How to view referring URLs (69 visitors)

Source: Measure Map

Browser Versions

This month Mozilla Firefox have surpassed Internet Explorer and can now claim 1st place with a 48.62% piece of the cake as the most used web browser on our weblog. Also Mac users using Safari and the readers with the Opera browser can claim a higher share than last month.

Browser Versions, January 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Statistical numbers

RSS/Atom

Around 15% of our hits come from news feed aggregators. This is a bit lower then previously where it was around 25%. This is mainly due to the high number of referrals we have gotten throughout January. As usually RSS and Atom hits have a certain amount of uncertainty build in since news aggregators checks for updates every x minutes – even if there is none – so that adds to the total as well.

Other graphs

Geographical reader location, January 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Visits by Source, January 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Visits by New and Returning, January 2006 – Source: Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: statistics, web statistics, analytics, google analytics, measure map, blogging, browser versions, browsers

Recently I have looked for better ways to display incoming links (referring URLs), Google Analytics can but it’s a tedious process. The WordPress Dashboard can only show some of the incoming links.

I must say that this part is done very well in MeasureMap.

MeasureMap list of incoming links

It really works well. It seems updated very frequently (maybe even real-time, which I haven’t tested).

Later on, we might publish a comparison of Google Analytics vs. MeasureMap.

Technorati Tags: web statistics, web stats, wordpress, wordpress dashboard, google analytics, measuremap

On January 10th, 2006, MacRumors.com successfully delivered live updates of the Macworld San Francisco Keynote speech to over 100,000 people simultaneously using the latest web technologies.

“By far the best mac keynote coverage I have ever seen. No constant page refreshing. No ‘page will update every three minutes’ even though they never do. I just let the page update every minute like it was supposed to. It was actually weird to get coverage without some sort of connection failure.” – MacRumors member, war

The live coverage web solution is basically a transscript updated frequently during the keynote. One article is about the traffic they experienced:

Our site was linked to widely across the web, including prominent links from Digg and Slashdot — two popular technology sites. These links caused no noticable “spike” in our number of visitors, illustrating the magnitude of traffic that MacRumorsLive was already receiving.

We peaked at approximately 103,000 simultaneous web visitors and 6,000 IRC viewers during the Keynote speech and transmited over 32 GB of data in a three hour period. If not for the efficiency of the MacRumorsLive AJAX update system, the same webcast would have required approximately twice as many servers and would have had to transfer almost 6 times as much data (196 GB).

With peak loads that reaches insane levels of almost 4,000 hits per second:

Hits/second (2)	3,812
IRC users	6,079
Simultaneous visitors	109,000
Bandwidth (3)	approx. 77Mbit/sec

They also posted an article about how they built the system which is insanely interesting

Traditionally, websites have coped with visitors during the keynotes by swapping to text-only pages, using HTML Meta Refresh to reload the page at set intervals, usually every three minutes, for example, MacRumors’ coverage from MacWorld in January 2005. As a result, the sites lose their identity and branding, and cannot make best use of the additional traffic for site promotion.

Even with all this simplification the sheer number of visitors can still take the server down. To provide the best coverage during live events an improved system is required.

As this system is retaining the normal layout of the site, all the necessary objects (CSS, images & Javascript) also need to be loaded. This increases the load placed on the web servers considerably in comparison to the old system, which only had a single text file to display. Even with the ability to use multiple servers, the web server software needs to be improved.

By using PHP to generate the necessary HTML & XML files every ten seconds, rather than each time the file is requested, it is possible to use small & simple web servers to deliver the public site, without the overhead of database usage. Two web server software packages are employed – lighttpd and thttpd – with Apache still being used for the administration interface.

The efficiency of these packages over Apache is considerable and allows quite modest hardware to be used to serve a large number of visitors. Benchmarks of lighttpd compared to various other packages can be found on their website. In our tests, thttpd was able to sustain in excess of 3,300 hits per second, whereas Apache managed only 600 hits per second for 20 seconds, before overloading the server due to memory usage. [1]

The use of these more specialised web servers allows a vast number of simultaneous visitors to be supported – as the system stands at the moment, in excess of 200,000.

This reminds me of Ajaxinfo (the guys behind AJAX usability metrics), AJAX ROI faceoff, where a traditional webapp is compared to an AJAX webapp. For the visually oriented, there is a video comparing the two applications at the end of the article.

Recently on Developer.com, I looked at ways for developers to communicate the value of Ajax in dollars and cents. Arguing for or against a technology usually creates some stress for developers, who tend to speak a different language from business decision makers.

Developers talk about Usability Bandwidth Ramp-up Cost of Ownership

Managers talk about Efficiency Transaction costs Training costs Return on Investment (ROI)

Right at the point. Performance website or not, the metrics he mentions above are almost like something Jakob Nielsen could have done. Conclusions:

Although every new technology should be greeted with a healthy amount of skepticism, there are clearly demonstrable, quantifiable advantages to using an Ajax architecture in a Web application. These cost savings originate primarily from time savings, but also from reductions in bandwidth requirements.

A representative test case showed that a business can save between 500 and 2,800 man hours per year on a 10-step hypothetical process, saving roughly 4 seconds per step (a between 30% and 70% reduction in labor costs).

Although the benefits of improved application architecture extend beyond mere time savings, when included in the decision making process, an ROI approach such as this can help make a solid business case for Ajax.

The benefits listed here are very similar to benefits when we’re arguing for web-standards: Reduced bandwith, training costs, cost of ownership, and increased return on investment. But for the time being I still believe that AJAX has increased learning costs for developers. (Although most developers are really keen on using AJAX and webstandards it still requires expert knowledge regarding libraries, backend integration and browser compatibility — to name a few).
I’d be happy to hear your comments on this. Please share more info here. Also check out Ajaxinfo’s Call for AJAX Studies.

UPDATE: Just saw Jonathan Boutelle’s Bandwidth Savings with AJAX blog post, that covers the same story and has a good point on AJAX fit frequently used applications:

The old-school RIA technology vendors always made the claim that using the RIA paradigm saves you bandwidth. Numbers on this were always hard to get, and hard to trust.

Theoretically it always made sense that an RIA would consume less bandwidth (in exchange for a larger initial download). The longer a user continues to use the application, the greater this benefit (so an RIA word processor might make more sense than an RIA news site).

Now, watching a keynote presentation takes at least an hour, so it’s definitely long enough to provide benefit. What we see in this case is really different though: AJAX is basically being used as a broadcast technique, grabbing new data every minute so that the user doesn’t have to refresh the entire page. For covering live events that have a large audience, this makes a ton of sense. Expect to see more content sites “pushing” content out to their users this way.

Technorati Tags: macrumor, ajax, performance, ajaxian, macworld, architecture, webdevelopment

I like WordPress Dashboard. The name suggests that it’s an overview of whats relevant to your blog. What’s happening. What’s popular. Who comments. What important updates are available. The Dashboard should work like in a car. The most important and relevant information should be visible at a glance. Lets have a brief look at the dashboard.
I suggest you only take a brief look to judge for your self whether you think the main objectives of the Dashboard page are met.

Click on the screenshot above for and look for 5 seconds only. Then ask yourself what you could remember from the page. Yup you just tried a 5 second usability test.

What works

The top left section “Welcome to WordPress” contains a brief overview for the most relevant actions to administer the weblog (write a post, update profile, etc.). This is added from version 2.0 and works well as an appetizer (especially for newbies).

“Latest activity” is a good headline that immediately gets my attention. I can see things happening: posts, comments, incoming links. Very good, as I think this sums up what I’d like to know from a dashboard-view. However, I don’t think that “latest activity” contains what it should to give me the complete overview.

What I think should improve

1. Incoming links should show ALL incoming links. The dashboard already has a box labeled “incoming links”, but it doesn’t show any referring URLs. Referring URLs (or link referrals) are registered by a browser as the page that link to the current page. In my opinion, referring URLs are of great value, as we want to know who link to us and how users get to know our website. I recently wrote that even in Google Analytics this feature is hard to find.
   “Incoming links” should show both trackbacks AND referring URLs. Most browsers send information as HTTP header “Referer” when they request the page.
2. Add recent searches to activity list. What are people searching for on my blog. Luckily we have a web-server access log that can tell me, but it requires digging and parsing a file on a regular basis. The dashboard has information recent trackback links and comments. It would be appropriate to add a list with recent searches.
3. Update the Dashboard when something interesting happens. Ajax calls to the web server could keep “Latest Activity” up-to-date whenever a comment is posted, searches and trackbacks are performed. Also the display could update when my partner posts a new article on the site.
4. Clean up the dashboard. Remove things that are not relevant to me. In particular, i think “Other WordPress News” are too dominant (although placed in the bottom below the fold). Only a few of the news are directly WordPress related. Other WordPress News could easily be replaced by a link to planet.wordpress.org (from which the news are taken). After all, this will lead to faster response times, and will probably make the Dashboard more relevant to users like myself that wonders what on earth “Owen Winkler: I didn’t do it” has to do with my blog.
5. Add latest drafts to Dashboard. Maybe it’s just me. Usually I’m working on 2-3 stories that I save as drafts. I think that these should be on the dashboard as well.

Here’s a quick mockup of the changes i propose.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, blogging, search, usability, google analytics, ajax, dashboard, wordpress dashboard