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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Is this really a problem crying out for a solution? The justification felt a bit forced to me. My only experience is integrating with Mixpanel from Scala. I wrote the following in an evening:

https://gist.github.com/4598180.git

Seriously, it wasn't a big deal. Maybe I'm spoiled by using Scala/Play -- the web client is asynchronous so the analytics calls aren't blocking the controller.

I'm far more annoyed that I get very little useful analysis from my analytics. That is, to me, a much more interesting and useful problem to solve.

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I talk to a lot of startups about analytics and this is definitely a problem that needs solving. Doing lots and lots of external API calls is nontrivial at scale for someone who is "just a Rails app". Lots of startups need analytics but are still at "just a Rails app" stage. If you're already async it's easy but so many people aren't.

You're 150% right on your second point - people have no fucking clue how to get business value out of analytics. I am trying to blog about it to help solve the problem, but it's a tricky thing to teach.

teej, you hit the nail on the head.

I'm a co-founder of SoundGecko.com and we have analytics but nothing anywhere near what we want.

Sticking points are: 1. It's going to take some time to get going 2. There are other business/product feature issues that need development 3. There is no decent reporting interface that works out of the box, is cheap, and is real time

I think Google Analytics with Event Tracking is the way to go by the looks of it.

+1.

I've spent lots and lots of time on this. I've used nearly every off-the-shelf system as well as some really well-done in-house systems (Zynga, in particular).

All have major shortfalls, and many startups have piecemeal data in multiple providers (AppAnnie! Flurry! MixPanel! Google Analytics! Internal Databases!) that only solve one little sliver of the problem and don't talk to each other. There's plenty of room for innovation and improvement.

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