ReadWriteWeb

Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?

As you work to develop your product - before and after launch, it's important that you use more than just "gut feelings" to ascertain what's working and what's not. Along those lines, last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of Carsonified offered a list of six key metrics for your web app and how to track them.

It's a great list - with definitions, calculation methods, examples, and even a link to a Google spreadsheet (see below for link) that you can use to input your own data.

When we wrote last week about "4 Tools for Assessing Cloud Performance," we asked for suggestions about other resources that can help companies monitor and evaluate cloud services. And we asked for suggestions as to what factors, in addition to cost and performance, might be important to weigh when making business decisions.

Jeffrey Abbott, Senior Product Marketing Manager in the Cloud Customer Solutions Unit at CA Technologies wrote a blog post in response: "Comparing the Relative Quality of Cloud Services - Is a single metric enough?" In it, he argues that not only are one or two variables insufficient, but that different parameters matter to different people. As such, a more robust index to evaluate cloud services needs to be developed.

The Exceptional Performance crew at Yahoo has launched Boomerang.

"Boomerang is a piece of Javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user's point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With Boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is."

The best way to reduce bounce rates and design a path of least resistance for members and customers is to offer something they want. While others prioritize member acquisition in order to build an early product test case, Sean Ellis has a slightly different philosophy. Ellis has worked with companies like LogMeIn and Xobni to produce scalable marketing programs. Before tweaking design and funnel optimization, Ellis takes pride in the fact that his successes have been built on establishing a core value to users.

The problem with hiring an arsenal of top sales and marketing executives when you don't have a proven customer model is that you're likely to burn through all that funding you worked so hard to get. Steve Blank's latest post entitled, It Must Be a Marketing Problem is a cautionary tale about a company that continued to scale up without knowing the needs of their customers.

Google Analytics may be free, but it is still based on proprietary technology - which means you only ever get reports on the things that Google thinks are necessary and some of those reports are aimed at people using Google's other services (managing campaigns on AdWords, for example). Further, using Google Analytics means that you're tied to Google's TOS. Enter Piwik, which aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad server alternative to Google Ad Manager [Ed: which we just started using on RWW].