Analytics tools: moving off Google Analytics

User feedback in the inbox this week:

"I just want to give you this short feedback.
In my opinion using Google Analytics is bad choice. I don't want to give always google informations when I use loom. Please switch to an other analytics tool with more privacy and no pipe to google or any other big company. I think Piwik (http://piwik.org/) for example is a better choice!

Thank you for your great service!
Jakob"

This comment was echoed by Sean over on the Yammer thread:

"A few of my community members were hesitant to sign up due to the presence of Google Analytics. While I can agree that GA is a necessary evil for stress-testing and figuring out how a site gets used, it'd be great to see support for a privacy-friendly FOSS alternative, such as Piwik."

I personally am fully in favour of moving over to Piwik, especially if our use of GA is creating a barrier to engagement for privacy-conscious users. The only question for me is one of resourcing, someone would need to volunteer to set us up on Piwik, and liaise with @Matthew who's been keeping tabs on the Analytics data to date.

Agree! Sean mentioned he might have someone over at diaspora who could get us info about piwik.

Wow.. Piwik looks awesome. I agree that we should consider this rather than GA.

My hunch: this is going to be important to a tiny slice of users; we should focus on the stuff in the pre-release & release lists first.

Personally have no problem with google analytics, I figure google probably knows everything about me anyway.

However if it's fast and easy to switch to piwik instead, and removes a barrier for some potential users/groups then why not.

Piwik is great, I have an instal running. I can add loom.io/loomio.org once I have moved the server to the US (this week)

If I may be of any assistance: a while ago, Maxwell (from Diaspora) wrote a gem for integrating Piwik into a Rails application using Rack. We use this for Diaspora, and to my knowledge, it works pretty well. You can check out the gem here: http://rubygems.org/gems/rack-piwik

Check out the GitHub project here: https://github.com/maxwell/rack-piwik

You can also check out a different method for integrating Piwik into Rails here: http://rubygems.org/gems/piwik_analytics

Hope these resources help for anyone considering Piwik!

+1 for ditching analytics - would be worthwhile solving this once and rolling out across all enspiral sites.

@sean, I don't get it, Piwik is trivial to insert into the application template. It's just the same as GA.

Made an account for you's on my server. It'll be a bit slow as it's in Koeln, but I'll move it to California soon.

I emailed the details to [email protected]