Real time? I might ditch Google Analytics and Statcounter (using both, mainly because statcounter is near real time, you just have to know when you're linked by Slashdot or Digg!)
for Yahoo if it works great. Will give it a try for sure!
It actually works very well, and we had a 7 second latency only - in the days of IndexTools. And the reason for only using the ‘up to the minute’ in Yahoo! marketing material, was to make sure we under promised and over delivered :-)
For as often as my co-founder and I check GA for our medium-traffic site, I'm a little concerned for our productivity if we can see analytics in real-time!
That's actually a good point. I wonder if there will be a way to maybe get alerts with YA. Maybe even write a small desktop application that gives you an at a glance look at what's going on.
It can easily kill your server. The last thing you want to do while having high traffic is kill your stats. You can think ahead and cache your pages, but you can't cache your self-hosted real time stats.
Good. Some of the most useful reports in Google Analytics ("Recency", "Loyalty") are also the most opaque. This could be refreshing if it makes it easier to get at stickiness and returning visitors out of the box.
Also:
Drill down on branches to follow visitor movements down to a single visit.
GA doesn't show you individual user visits. This would be stupendous, as right now we are forced to write our own middleware to capture this granularity.
If they can offer a decent API to their analytics, I'll jump on board right away. It's so frustrating that Google does not provide anything other than a web interface and manually generated exports to interface with their data. And as far as I can decipher, making that data available to your site users is against the TOS anyway. Maybe Yahoo can do better.
Looks cool. Google has been top notch for me for a few years now, but this looks even better!
Though, you can be sure Google will make it near real-time and have an API soon! If/When that happens, I may just return to Google. So try to impress me Yahoo! :)
Isn't Google real time? The default calendar doesn't include today when you look at stats, but you can just change it. I don't know what the lag is exactly, but I don't think it's all that far off.
Well, taking a look at how long it took the new delicious to get out, I'd say Yahoo doesn't mess around when it comes to building large scale services like this. I quickly warmed up to the new delicious, but fwiw, it's been rock solid ever since it (finally) came out.
