While taking part in the Dallas WordCamp a couple of weeks ago we were introduced to Woopra but one of the company founders John Pozadzides and given an opportunity to take part in the beta trial of the hosted, real-time website analytics program.
The first reaction to Woopra by almost everyone is WOW! Visually the application is very engaging and includes features such as a world map that shows a ping wherever someone is hitting your website from in real time and a stock-type ticker at the bottom with scrolling statistics among a myriad of other things. You can drill down into your statistics any number of ways, tag visitors (i.e. if you know who they are you can always know when they come to visit) and even start a real time chat with them (could be creepy or fun depending on how you look at it and use it).
For any stats geeks out there Woopra will be a must. You can sign up now and as soon as they have openings in the Beta trial they'll let you in. Otherwise, you'll have to want until general availability. Some noise has been made about the usefulness of "real-time" statistics but I can easily imagine situations where real time stats could be very useful such as during a campaign or product launch, or for monitoring sudden bandwidth issues and requesting real-time increase of bandwidth from your host. If you have ever observed the "Digg effect" on your website you know what I am talking about. I'd also like to say, it's just cool...
Cali Lewis, host of GeekBrief.tv had an opportunity to interview John P. at WordCampand provide a more in depth demo of the platform which will include API's for expansion.
One thing I would personally like to see built in (hint hint if you read this John) would be real time threshold notices so that if my traffic suddenly spikes while I'm not watching the screen I get an SMS message, that way I can call up my webhost and increase bandwidth on the fly preventing a site crash (or crash of anyone else's if on a shared server).
This would make a nice integration point between Woopra and Layered Technology's ability to throttle bandwidth on the fly and leverage their gridLayer computing system.
I'll hold off on a full review until the product is out of Beta and generally available.
