wanderingstan

Well, at least it’s supposed to be recorded.

Last month I wrote a post about tapefailure, a new web analytics company that records everything a user does on your site. Down to every movement of the mouse.

They officially launched yesterday and I installed it here on wanderingstan.com. First impressions are that it looks great and very slick, but the fidelity of the recording seems shakey at times. They may still be working out bugs.

To see what a visit recording looks like, click the tape below. (Since they used the tape analogy, this is only fitting!)

It’s the “best” recording I’ve gotten so far, which isn’t saying much. But you can imagine how cool (and interesting and scary) this will be when it’s fully working.

…

How can I be excited about this and be infuriated at (for example) ComCast or Google recording much corser bits of personal data? Damn. There’s a real tension there which I’ll have to work out in another post.

What if a site could record all the behavior of its visitors? I wrote about this a few weeks ago with my about a little hack to record all the text selections that are made here on wanderingstan.com. (It’s still recording, as you can see.)

Well, as is so often the case online, someone has already done it. Yesterday I learned about tapefailure.com.

Tapefailure lets you record your users’ browsing sessions and play them back, just like a tape, as well as view numerous userful statistics about your users.

There are of course privacy concerns, but once again I recall the insight of Greg Yardley from last summer regarding the AOL search scandal.

Stop treating the Internet like a book or newspaper and remember that whatever you’re looking at is simultaneously looking at you.

(Previously mentioned here.)

Yardley’s advice may be lost on us old fogies, but I was encouraged yesterday by reading Dana Boyd’s keynote talk at Etech.

The rules of privacy are fundamentally changing. For the first time, an entire generation is forced to deal and, for the most part, they are dealing. It’s not pretty and there are plenty of hiccups, but they’re doing a lot better than us old folk. … Personally, I think that we need to look to them to see what they’re doing and try learning from it.