Mastodawn

Cabel Sasser Jun 27, 2024

Office cleanout: finding these stickers brought back good memories. I truly loved Urchin — it was the best analytics system I’d ever seen, crunched your http logs and gave you great web stats.

It became Google Analytics.

Ever wonder why URLs today sometimes have the letters ?utm in them… it stands for Urchin Tracking Module!

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Nelson Minar Jun 27, 2024

@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.

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MacBalance

@nelson @cabel There was an interesting semi-technical discussion that Disney’s web sites had so many issues due to different groups internal requiring different trackers and such. Enough that all the analytics and related scripting caused errors and page load fails, which of course prevented the site selling product like it was supposed to do.