@cabel Like looking at a picture of Anakin Skywalker

@cabel In the early days of TextDrive Urchin analytics was provided as part of the shared hosting plans…until Google bought them and we were no longer able to renew the license. It was great!

@cabel when I worked at Google (15 years ago) someone during orientation told me that UTM actually stands for "Uncle Traveling Matt" (the Fraggle Rock character) and I believed that for... way too long...

@cabel omg, thank you. As a geographer, UTM always means “universal transverse Mercator” and seeing utm in so many URLs has always weirded me out.

@cabel That is amazing! TIL

@cabel I admined Urchin for years at a university and still miss it. Google Analytics was nicer-looking and added some interesting new capabilities, but tracking on the server side is a far better method for users AND admins.

@cabel I was at Google when it acquired Urchin and it was a great product. But also set the stage for mass surveillance via included Javascript trackers. Now many sites are loaded with 10+ things and my location, age, and HIV status are sold to advertisers. The privacy invasion was a bad idea.

@cabel Oh wow! I had no idea that is where ?utm originated from. #TIL

@cabel thank for sharing how yet another part of Google that we take for granted was actually acquired to begin with 😄

@cabel that's really interesting!

@cabel I hate how I have to delete ?utm= all the time from URLs to get clean URLs to share to people

@cabel yes, urchin was great. I even got one of the Google Mini Search appliances after they took over. That was awesome too.

@cabel Inspiring to start a new Urchin

@cabel how did I not know this

@cabel Hah! Client asked me about a UTM code the other day. I don’t dabble in the GA Dark Arts, so I kicked it back. But yes — I do remember using Urchin, back when my laptop must have been powered by AA batteries.

@cabel We need to stop tech company acquisitions.

@cabel And it was faster than anything else that was crunching logs.

@cabel The whole story of my resume can basically be summarized as “I did X before it became Y.” I was in charge of the Urchin implementation at the data center where I worked and we basically browbeat them into writing license management code so we didn’t have to track how many licenses we needed to pay for at any one time. I also wrote a lot of automation tools around re-fetching missing logs and rerunning the processing app after that happened.

@cabel UTM! TIL! THX 🙂

@cabel I did some GA4 training for some work colleagues and did a bit of a history of Urchin becoming Google Analytics. Everyone knew the term utm but no one knew why.

@cabel we ran this next to our MacOS 8 WebSTAR www servers. Truly great software!

@cabel @powerllama I have wondered for so long what UTM stands for this is fantastic thank you for sharing

@cabel Huh, TIL! Always wondered what the `utm` meant. My life is now that much more complete

@cabel I have actually wondered that! Thanks for the neat trivia! 🤩