Posts tagged sucks

Why Am I Moving Away from Google Analytic’s

Tech

Oh Urchin how far have you fallen… the old Google Analytic’s interface is dead and now we are all forced into the new interface, not that i care that much and yeah the new interface as a huge bunch of new features, like real-time stats, multi-channel funnels, social stats, mobile stats and a bunch of other neet stuff, thats cool, but that’s not all…

So my reason to drop Google Analytic’s is simple, unlike what Google might want you to believe, the service is not free, Google gets a lot back from “offering” Google Analytic’s, it can increase its tracking of the internet, even if anonymous, its still more power to Google’s big brother machine, also its a way like Google Webmaster to find more about the web, who links to who and how, its also a way of pushing its Adwords business, still I’m not that paranoid and i did feel like what Google offered was a pretty simple and advance stats tool.

So yeah… my real reason to quit is their re-design, the new Google Analytic’s has lots of awesome features, but unfortunately it completely and absolutely sucks if you have more than 1 site, the new design didn’t just add stuff it removed a lot of old stuff and made the whole interface slower and clunkier, here are some of the stuff i hate on the new Google 
Analytic’s:

  1. The Whole Stats Engine is Slow – Maybe because of the real-time stuff, I’ve seen it drag down page load even with asynchronous loading (that just means it doesn’t block other page elements, it still takes some time to load).
  2. The Interface is Slow – Its kinda going a bit of the way of Gmail, you keep adding stuff and the beautiful Ajax becomes a dragged out process, if you see small yellow “loading” markers or full page “please wait loading”, then the ajax interface isn’t helping at all.
  3. The Interface is Confusing – Quoting the Google 
    Analytic’s team “We are particularly proud of the attention to detail that our user experience team has put into making the interface easy to use, understandable and beautiful”, hummm Google? hello! your user experience team sucks! beautiful… well maybe, it does conform better with Google’s now passion with grey and orange, but easy to use and understandable that’s just funny, now, to do the exact same things that you used to do, you have to click 3 times more, stuff is hidden or on different places, it also has a lot of stuff laying around and 1/3 is always junk (links to news and help and other Google products…).
  4. You Cant See Aggregation Stats – Ohh yeah have more than 1 site? you used to be able to know how your network was doing, now you cant… why? its not that hard to add it.
  5. You cant see Simplified Stats of every Site – There is no way to give a quick glance on all the sites you have, see like before 2 or 3 simple metrics, like visitors, pageviews and trend (if you your visitors are up or down), no you get white space for your trouble.

But don’t trust my word, here are some examples of what i’m talking….

Google Analytic’s Dashboard

What am i supposed todo with this? its a huge blank page starting at me, has no value, no data, just a bunch of junk… so anyone starting Google Analytic’s does so with at least 1 extra click!

Joking! you need 2 extra clicks to go anywhere, brilliant stuff here!

Domain Stats Page



What is this… madness!!!! Yep that’s the main page, filled with… lots of redundant junk, badly organized and slow as shit, yes i know you can customize, but come on!!!! i have 70+ sites and 100+ domains, am i going to customize every single page to make it bearable?

Ohh you wanna change the domain? its just a easy 4 step process!

So to sum it up, i call this one a FAIL! the new Google Analytic’s is new eye candy with new features, but for that they destroyed the usability and good old features, that coupled with slow speed and awkward interface kinda killed it for me, I’m moving to WordPress Stats and Statcounter, i know i wont be able to see aggregated stats but at least these ones are cleaner and quicker and i can always add later on a quick stat package for my entire network.

Review of Facebook Comments

Reviews 5 Comments

Well this isn’t a rant just about facebook comments as to the facebook API in general, I’ve learned this the hard way, you should never ever, EVER EVER put any part of your site under someone elses control, that means that hosted software or software as a service, regarding websites is a big NONO, only completely internet illiterates should go that route, cause its a very tricky one.

Lets say that my hosting provider goes down, or bankrupts, or decides my site is ugly, well that sucks, but i can move my site elsewhere, even if they shut me down in the middle of the night without any warning, i have my offsite backups, i can move on, it could take some hours or days, but its not the endgame, same goes for any of my domains, even if someone steals them or the government decides that a site about anime panties could burn children’s eyes, i would lose traffic, but i can always move to another domain, see no single point of failure, there is a fail-safe for all my work.

Now with facebook you are relinquishing control of your comments, login, data, for the sake of easiness and more widespread promotion, so what happens when facebook bans your site, or decides to change/end the API and you are left with nothing or at least a big headache, cause your users are not your users, your comments are not your comments, they are facebook’s, and they decides what is best for them, not for your site.

Also facebook as a kinda personal social effect on people, by basically forcing you to be yourself and not a nickname or handle, and transmitting to your friends pretty much everything you say, it breeds a different kind of internet user, one that instead of honest or idiotic commenting, you have a bland audience, that says stuff as much about the subject as about what they think their friends would want them to say, its vanity commenting, and for that shit, you can just stay inside facebook’s walls.

I don’t think what you get from facebook is all that great, the conversations are bland and it detracts most of the time, you get a bland looking comment box and bland people talking on it about bland things, were is the awesome juice?, trolling most of the times is comedy genius, like when techcrunch put facebook comments and said it was the best thing evah!, well i guess not, cause they went back to their old comment system, ill say it again, when you put your data in someone elses pocket you lose value and in the case of facebook comments you lose value and gain boring banal conversations instead, winwin? not really.

Anyways don’t get me wrong, its not just facebook, the disqus, intensedebates and cocomment of the world, with the rare exception, like if its a temporary page or comments are not the focus, just a add-on for help or faq, yeah then its a somewhat good idea to outsource, but for all other cases, naaa the shinny extras you get, don’t pay for the fact that what you create from their own is out of your hands.

Well there is an exception, the “like button”, but i view that as any other “share me” button, maybe it has better hits than most, but nothing completely awesome or mandatory, you can as easily turn it off, with no impact to your site ^_^ .o( may