Analytics tools: moving off Google Analytics
Alanna Irving Sun 2 Sep 2012 11:47PM
Agree! Sean mentioned he might have someone over at diaspora who could get us info about piwik.
Robert Guthrie Sun 2 Sep 2012 11:48PM
Wow.. Piwik looks awesome. I agree that we should consider this rather than GA.
Matthew Bartlett Mon 3 Sep 2012 12:26AM
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.
Paul Smith Mon 3 Sep 2012 1:10AM
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.
Kiesia Carmine Mon 3 Sep 2012 1:18AM
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)
Sean Tilley Mon 3 Sep 2012 4:56AM
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!
Joshua Vial Mon 3 Sep 2012 6:11AM
+1 for ditching analytics - would be worthwhile solving this once and rolling out across all enspiral sites.
Kiesia Carmine Mon 3 Sep 2012 9:06AM
@sean, I don't get it, Piwik is trivial to insert into the application template. It's just the same as GA.
Kiesia Carmine Mon 3 Sep 2012 9:23AM
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]
Richard D. Bartlett · Sun 2 Sep 2012 11:40PM
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.