Of course, by October things were a bit different in the Twitterverse, as on the streets of New York and elsewhere. The above screen shot shows centers of influence from Huffington Post and Keith Olbermann, with smaller nodes from the New York Post, CNN and the Associated Press. Where is the coverage by the Grey Lady? Too small to see with my eyes. That in itself shows you how the message was spread and who was relevant and who wasn't. Fascinating.

"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."

When we launch a site or write a blog or anything else online, a combination of our experience and expectations give us a sense of how our site will be used. The problem is, nobody is free of the chains of their own subjectivity. If you're an intuitive person, or someone with a very strong point of view, stats can be either a harsh corrective or a pleasant affirmation of your gut instincts. Boomerang hopes to help you see your site from the end-user's point of view.
Among the uses of Boomerang, the team has listed these possible measurements.

+ A page's perceived performance - it takes into account the moments at which a page becomes usable for a reader
+ Performance of dynamic pages
+ User bandwidth
+ Component load time
+ Network latency

Boomerang API is downloadable here.
Boomerang's github page is here.

Knock yourselves out you crazy kids.

Piwik originates from France and almost all the attention so far has been from outside USA. It seems to be catching on in Japan and China, as well as in Europe. The team responsible for Piwik seems to be made up of interns from big companies such as Amazon, Intel and even Google.

You need PHP and MySQL to use Piwik, which is no problem for techies but any widespread adoption will need a hosted version. Some entrepreneur is likely to offer that. Plug-ins to WordPress and other blogging platforms will also be needed, but cannot be that hard.

Open source products usually get traction, even when they are raw, when the alternative is too expensive or restrictive. Google Analytics is free, so it is hard to see rapid adoption by bloggers and small media companies. It is possible that Piwik will get better traction in companies that already use one of the expensive web analytics services from companies such as Coremetrics, Omniture and Visual Sciences/Websidestory.

Larger companies may have some pause for concern before switching to Google Analytics, because of the service's Terms of Service. An analyst in the IT department is likely to point out two clauses (yes big companies DO read this stuff):

"2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may change its fees and payment policies for the Service from time to time including but not limited to the addition of costs for geographic data, the importing of cost data from search engines, or other fees charged to Google or its wholly-owned subsidiaries by 3rd party vendors for the inclusion of data in the Service reports."

So, don't go above 5 million page views without paying something to Google via AdWords. That may make one a bit uneasy, but it is the "Google may change its fees and payment policies" that will have both IT and Legal aiming to nix the deal.

Then a bit later on you get:

"6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service. Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties unless Google (i) has Your consent; (ii) concludes that it is required by law or has a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public; or (iii) provides such information in certain limited circumstances to third parties to carry out tasks on Google's behalf (e.g., billing or data storage) with strict restrictions that prevent the data from being used or shared except as directed by Google . When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on Google's instructions and in compliance with this Agreement and appropriate confidentiality and security measures."

In short, they have the right to use your data. We have lived for a long time in a world where Microsoft and others charged for the software and kept it under a tight IP control, but did not try to take any use of the data. Google reversed that. Google is happy to let you use anything for free, as long as they get to use your data. That is OK for most individuals and small businesses, but totally unacceptable for large companies.

Piwik is working hard to be developer-friendly, not just relying on open source. They claim 4 big advantages:

1. Open API
2. Plug in architecture
3. Data abstraction layer
4. Customizable dashboard

But the nub of the issue for most big companies will be the data ownership issue. That is why Piwik is really a Google Analytics alternative, even if they will see few firms switching from GA initially. IT groups, under pressure to cut costs, will look at Google Analytics as an alternative to their current analytics software and reject the option based on TOS restrictions. Then some bright spark will Google the term "open source alternative google analytics" and see Piwik on top of the organic listings.

Nielsen breaks the data down into categories, which is really the most interesting part of their report because it indicates what sort of properties are currently the most popular on the mobile web. The biggest benefactors of mobile were weather and entertainment, categories that each saw a 22% average audience lift when factoring in mobile sites. As Allen Stern on CenterNetworks notes, though, mapping seems mysteriously absent from Nielsen's data.

TotalWeb - Average Online Audience Lift Provided by Mobile Web, by Category (Q4 2007)
Category	Average Lift (%)
Total	13
Weather1	22
Entertainment	22
Games	15
Music	15
Email	11
Sports	10
Business/Finance	4
Social Networking	3
Search	2
Shopping/Auctions	1
Source: TotalWeb Q4 2007, The Nielsen Company. Based on 200+ Internet sites measured across both Home PC and Mobile Internet. 1To be read: In Q4 2007, weather sites measured by TotalWeb averaged a 22% lift in overall audience reach through mobile web traffic, over home PC traffic alone.