London Riots Map, based on Google Maps was created when the riots broke out to chart the London riots from a first person perspective by plotting tweets with the hashtag #londonriots that have an associated postcode. Cravify, a service for mapping events has also been used in a similar way.

We decided to put together a simple visualisation of how the events in London have unfolded – both in terms of web traffic that we monitored on GoSquared (we provide real-time web analytics after all – perfect for events like this), and from our first hand perspective being based in London.

Real-time monitoring proven useful again.

We reached out to Ben Fishman, soon after he created such a topical application. The challenge was on to map and analyse the audience and the interest in the app and the riots themselves. GoSquared’s real-time monitoring proved extremely useful in understanding how the worldwide audience were discovering and understanding the London riots as they were happening.

GoSquared is enablng the LondonRiotMap to get an in-depth and professional insight into a variety of information including:

• Referrers to the site.
• Search terms being used to reach the site.
• Tweets related to the riots.
• The locations of specific visitors and the time of day they were finding out about the riots.

GoSquared’s features have shown that in just the first evening there has been a huge international interest with over 26,000 web visitors from North America, Europe, East Asia and Australasia.

The GoSquared team has thankfully been largely unaffected by the riots in London and the rest of the UK this week. We wish the best of luck to everyone recovering from such a difficult week in the UK.

Please let us know if any stats or details are incorrect – we’ll do our best to fix them as soon as possible.

Try GoSquared now – free for 30 days!

Thanks,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor, Saul Cullen, Gerhard Lazu and Micky Blackburn (our new intern!)
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

Today we’re pleased to announce GoSquared LiveStats 3.2. Despite only a single point update, this is a massive update, and we are very excited to finally share some information about what we’ve been working on recently.

Completely rewritten for speed, power, and flexibility.

90% of the work in 3.2 has been under the hood. It’s like we gave GoSquared a new engine, new suspension, new gearbox, and topped it off with a new set of wheels and a paint job.

The new GoSquared LiveStats makes use of some cutting edge technologies such as Node.JS which enables us to handle dramatically larger sites with more visitors without trading performance.

We’re continuing to evolve our platform built on top of the hugely popular and growing Amazon Web Services. We’ve done a lot of work that we hope you’ll never have to see or worry about so that we can scale up (and down) with the demands our customers put on us.

Our CTO, Geoff Wagstaff will be posting on the blog in the coming days discussing what’s improved in more detail. Stay tuned!

Custom parameters for visitors.

The visitor list isn’t dead. We’ve taken it to the next level.

We already help you understand your visitors better than anyone else – GoSquared makes it possible to see where individual visitors have been referred from, and dive into their current browsing session to see which pages they’re looking at and how long they’re spending on each page. We even give you all the information you need about the device they’re using so you can make informed decisions about their current situation.

Custom Parameters enables you to take any of the additional data you have about your user base, whether that be the customers on your ecommerce store, the fans of your blog, or the contributors of your wiki, and bring it right into GoSquared where you need it most. Understand the value of individual users, the loyalty of your top fans, and dedication of your top contributors when they’re on your site – right now.

It’s never been easier to understand and engage with your site’s audience.

Improved traffic alerts.

Our customers love the real-time traffic alerts we launched earlier this year.

Being notified immediately about traffic spikes and lulls is proving a life saving feature for all the sys admins out there. Not to mention the customer support teams who can spot issues quicker than ever. You can now to choose to be alerted via email to any email address you choose. Today, we’re also adding the ability to be notified via Twitter Direct Messages – so even if you’re on the go, you’ll be on top of your site whenever you have a Twitter client with you.

All new Live API.

Reforming the architecture of GoSquared meant we could rethink our API. The new Live API brings the power of GoSquared to everyone. LiveStats 3.2 is built on top of our new API so it’s mission critical not only to our community, but to ourselves. The new API enables you to pull all the information you can see in LiveStats 3.2 so the only limit is your imagination. Not only is it possible to build incredible native applications, or bring the same LiveStats tools to your own dashboards, but it’s also possible to start adjusting your site’s content in real-time.

Ever wanted to build a list of the content that’s popular on your site right this second? Do it with GoSquared. Want to promote today’s most popular products on your ecommerce store? Do it with GoSquared. The opportunities to adjust and improve your site’s content automatically are just getting started – and GoSquared is here to make it as easy and as fast as possible.

Learn more about the GoSquared API now.

Respond now. Not tomorrow.

We’ve been working on this release for months, and we’re really excited to hear what you think of it. We’ve been rolling 3.2 out to all of our customers in the last week, so go sign in right now and tell us what you think!

Enjoy,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor, and Saul Cullen
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

Chances are you may have heard that the EU is introducing a few changes to legislation around cookies and internet privacy. Not everyone, if anyone, fully understands the new laws coming into effect, but we thought it’d be wise to share what we know and understand so far.

The uncertainty around these laws has caused the UK to delay enforcement for a year to fully comply. There’s a very useful document (PDF) provided by the UK ICO that helps explain what is changing in plain English.

What are the new EU cookie laws?

• EU Directive 2009/136/EC requires prior consent for “storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored” – Articles 5(3) and 6(3).
• Article 29 WP Opinion 171 states that all data read from a device is protected (3.2.1.): “Article 5(3) requires obtaining informed consent to lawfully store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user.”

When do I need to start worrying about these new laws?

The new EU legislation was supposed to have been passed by all EU countries by 25th May 2011. The only countries to have responded so far are the UK, Denmark, and Estonia.

The UK has given site owners another year to get their sites in order before enforcing the cookie laws.

Enforcement of these laws in unlikely any time soon. However, as a precaution, it is encouraged that all sites review their policies on privacy and understand which cookies they are asking their visitors to store.

How does GoSquared currently use cookies to provide real-time analytics?

We currently have very little dependence on cookies. GoSquared’s cookies are stored on the end user’s device as if they were created by the site that is using GoSquared itself.

The only reason GoSquared uses cookies is to identify each of your visitors as a unique visitor, and to determine whether they have been to your site before.

We do not use cookies to transfer data about individual visitors between multiple sites.

We do not use cookies to enable our customers to adapt content on their sites based on browsing patterns and history across other sites using GoSquared.

We do not share any analytical information that we collect with any third parties without prior consent.

We store all information on our secure servers hosted by Amazon Web Services. We backup all files securely and redundantly. We have strict internal policies on staff access to the analytical information we collect.

View GoSquared’s Privacy Policy.

How do the new laws affect GoSquared?

We’re still assessing how the changes to EU privacy law affect GoSquared’s ability to enable you to monitor your website’s traffic in real-time. We are confident that GoSquared will continue to be just as powerful, useful, and fun as you know it right now.

We do not rely on cookies to detect information about your site’s visitors – knowing which browser, which operating system, screen size, and the location of your visitors (and much more) is all possible whether cookies are present or not.

We are working on a number of different technologies behind the scenes right now, and our reliance on browser cookies is decreasing all the time.

What is GoSquared doing to help explain this complex issue to my site’s visitors?

We are working to provide you, our customers, with an easy-to-read set of text that you can copy and paste into your own sites to help explain what you are using GoSquared for. This text will explain how we use cookies, and how we store, process, and secure all information that we receive.

It is likely that you will need to actively notify your visitors about the cookies they need to accept. It is important to stress that if you are using other analytical services and advertising services, then you will need to notify your visitors of the cookies these services are using and relying on – they may be very different to GoSquared.

Previously, if a visitor’s browser was set to accept cookies then this was classed as “obtaining consent” from your visitors. However, we all know that isn’t really the case – there’s a lot of nasty services out there that store cookies on individuals’ machines for harmful or dishonest reasons, and a lot of internet users don’t realise this. That’s why the new laws state that you must obtain prior consent in one of a number of unsubtle ways:

• The UK ICO site has a PDF on how you can legitimately gain consent from your site’s visitors.
• The ICO site itself has an example of how you can ask for permission to store cookies (along the top).
• All Things D also has a notice that shows when you first visit (you may need to clear your cookies to see it) that clarifies which cookies are being used.

Have questions?

GoSquared is continuing to evaluate the various laws and directives from the EU Commission. We want your feedback on this, and we want to hear from you if you have any concerns. Please feel free to keep this discussion going with us on the blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, or send us an email.

View GoSquared’s Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

This stuff is tricky

Because it’s so tricky, and you’ve taken the time to read up on this, here’s a good recipe for some chocolate chip cookies.

Note: In case it wasn’t clear – this was an April Fools joke, and is not a project we intend to actively develop going forward. We shall keep the page online for the memories, though, just like we did with FutureStats.

Building on top of the powerful foundations of LiveStats by GoSquared, we’re very excited to announce LiveStats 3D – an entirely new way to visualise your site’s traffic in real-time.

Extensive research and testing, combined with overwhelming customer feedback showed us that just “watching” your traffic unfold wasn’t enough. People wanted to feel their traffic. They wanted to experience that same punch-in-the-stomach feeling their servers experience in a traffic spike.

Attention Grabbing

Our Head of data visualisation and engineering at GoSquared, Mr. Tren Dee, explained that in the current climate of data overload, visualisations need to work harder to gain the attention of users.

With LiveStats 3D, we’ve made it impossible to ignore your traffic stats. LiveStats 3D utilises an initial draft spec of HTML6 (due for release later this century) to fully utilise your computer’s screen real-estate, processor cores, and memory to provide a truly immersive experience. *

Based on our experience from developing Futurestat’s traffic spike prediction engine, LiveStats 3D transcends the limitations of traditional two-dimensional space to provide a unbeatably unique statistical journey of marvel, wonder and awe. In end-user tests, we’ve actually seen people break down and cry due to such an incredible experience. The world is not 2D, so why should your stats
be?

Improved Twitter Integration with the Dick Bar

Also coming in LiveStats 3D, we have completely overhauled Twitter integration. Overwhelming feedback from everyone** who loved the Twitter Dick Bar suggested LiveStats was incomplete without such functionality. Now that Twitter has decided to remove the Dick, ahem Quick Bar from the native iPhone client, we felt it was our duty to keep the functionality alive and kicking for the user base that
desires it.

Learn more about LiveStats 3D now! And watch the 3D video on YouTube.

* Fully immersive experience requires 3D red/green glasses.
** Ev sends his regards.

Perhaps we’re crazy. For 3 days only this week we’re offering 12 months – that’s 365 whole days – of GoSquared Plus (normally $24.99 monthly) for just $50.

What does $50 get you?

• 500,000 pageviews per month for 12 months.
• Full access to LiveStats for real-time traffic monitoring.
• Trends for those who are allergic to Google Analytics.
• Unlimited real-time traffic alerts for traffic spikes and lulls.
• Monitoring for up to 5 sites.
• Team sharing with as many colleagues as you want.

We’re really excited to be able to give this away at such a discounted price – but we can’t for long! This offer is only available this week until Friday. Get it while you can!

Get 12 months of GoSquared for just $50 on AppSumo now!

* This deal is only available to new users, sorry to all of you wonderful existing members – we’re doing lot more to keep you happy. Promise!

Update: The AppSumo deal is now over! You’ll have to be quicker next time.

Today is a very special day for us. Today is GoSquared’s 5th birthday, and what a birthday it is.

Angel Investment from Stefan Glaenzer and other top Investors

The GoSquared Team is thrilled to announce today that we have just closed an initial round of angel investment from leading investors Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge, Robert Dighero, and Thomas Jones.

We won’t be disclosing the amount raised, but we are extremely excited about the position this puts us in to push GoSquared even further along our path to building the best real-time website analytics platform on the web. It’s fantastic to have the backing of some of the most experienced, connected investors in the London tech scene. Their belief in our plans for the future fills us with excitement for what we can achieve next.

White Bear Yard

As part of the investment, we decided to move into some amazing offices in central London. GoSquared is now based full-time at White Bear Yard, along with other exciting UK startups including Mendeley, Smarkets, and Timetric.

Learn more about White Bear Yard.

Incredible Response to LiveStats 3

As many of you will know, we released the third major version of our flagship real-time web analytics app – LiveStats in mid January.

LiveStats 3 received some fantastic press attention from some of the biggest news blogs in the wold including TechCrunch, WebAppers, Web Analytics World, FUEL Your Blogging, and TheNextWeb. Not to mention the incredible feedback from everyone on Twitter – we’ve been overwhelmed by the response on Twitter, Facebook, and over email. We’ve made our best attempts to get back to everyone who’s contacted us, but if we haven’t replied to you yet we promise we’ll get round to it very soon. If you’ve mentioned us on Twitter, posted about us on Facebook, or emailed us recently, we thank you.

LiveStats 3 introduced an entirely redesigned interface, making it easier than ever to see what content is popular on your website right now. LiveStats shows you where your traffic is coming from – social media, websites, or search terms, and which pages of your site those traffic sources are leading to. With LiveStats you can visualise your website’s traffic in new ways, such as with a map view which superimposes the location of your visitors on an interactive world map. Close to 5,000 websites are now using GoSquared to monitor their traffic in real-time, and we’re absolutely thrilled with how LiveStats has been received so far.

If you haven’t already, check out LiveStats 3 now, and watch your traffic unfold.

One more thing – LiveStats 3.1 with Alerts

We’re pleased to bring you an update to GoSquared LiveStats. Version 3.1 unleashes a myriad of bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as a few great new features including Alerts.

LiveStats Alerts notifies you if your traffic is behaving in interesting ways. You can set upper and lower boundaries for your traffic volume, and LiveStats will alert you by email every time your traffic breaks past these boundaries. You will know immediately when you’re experiencing a traffic spike, giving you the opportunity to load LiveStats find out what’s sending you your traffic. LiveStats Alerts also notifies you when your traffic is lower than a defined boundary, for those dreaded days when your site might be having issues or is unable to cope with its current load, so you can immediately be on hand to monitor the situation.

Sign in to your GoSquared Account now to gain access to LiveStats 3.1 – start using Alerts by going to your LiveStats Preferences. Set up is easy peasy, but if you have any issues, you might find an answer on the Alerts support page.

Today, we’re very excited to announce the latest version of GoSquared LiveStats – version 3.

We’ve rewritten LiveStats from the ground up to focus around seeing which content is popular on your site at a glance. The centre of the interface shows a list of all the pages people are viewing on your site. The left side shows where your traffic is coming from – what people are tweeting, which sites are linking to you, and what people are searching for.

Learn more about the great new features of LiveStats 3, and sign up now!

Today we’re announcing two huge improvements to GoSquared. We’re introducing a new structure for user accounts and plans to make GoSquared more affordable, easier to join and simpler to upgrade. We’re also releasing an overhaul of the Site Manager application and renaming it Settings.

The new Settings app

Introducing a completely redesigned application for managing everything in your GoSquared Account, along with all the websites you’ve added to GoSquared.

Settings will look familiar if you’ve been using GoSquared for any period of time – it’s replacing what was previously known as Site Manager for managing the sites in your GoSquared Account. All the settings that were there before – editing of website name, URL, updating your site image preview, sharing options – are all still available.

Along with managing your websites, you can also edit your personal details, change your password, and upgrade your GoSquared Account (more on that shortly).

Updates to GoSquared Accounts

The most notable change introduced with the Settings app is that there is a new option in the sidebar called “My Account” – head here to upgrade your GoSquared Account.

Until today, when you signed up for a plan (see plans and pricing), that plan would apply to a website on GoSquared. From now on, plans will apply to user accounts rather than to websites.

What does that mean? Before – if you signed up for a premium plan, that plan would only apply for one website, so even if you had 3 websites in your GoSquared account, you would only gain the increased pageview limit and additional features of the premium account for one website. We didn’t think that was fair – and a lot of people requested we change things so that the pageviews they were paying for could be shared across all sites in their account.

From today onwards when you sign up for a plan on GoSquared, the features and the number of pageviews on that plan will apply to all sites in your GoSquared account.

If you’re only on the free plan and you currently have multiple websites in your account then not too much will change except the pageview limit on the free plan – 10,000 pageviews monthly, will now be shared across all of your websites.

If you have any queries about the latest changes to GoSquared accounts, have a look at this support document.

Behind the scenes

We’ve improved the functionality of the Settings app to be easier to use, and even faster than before by utilising the latest in HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery goodness. You won’t have to reload the screen at all – everything refreshes immediately, and tabs switch as soon as they’re clicked without any waiting.

Settings is there to be quick and easy – people want to jump in, change a detail, and get back to looking at their stats. That’s why we designed the URL structure to allow you to bookmark any screen in Settings and return to it at a later date. It’s also why you can jump straight to Settings from the sign in screen by clicking the Settings icon. Small things, but hopefully they’ll save you some valuable time.

I don’t understand! Help me!

We’ve put together a support document outlining some of the top questions you may have regarding the changes to GoSquared accounts. Have a read of the support page, and if you still have questions please feel free to email us, tweet us, facebook us, or leave a comment on Get Satisfaction.

Still not using GoSquared for real-time web analytics? Sign up now

This has been a huge project behind the scenes for the whole team, and we hope you like the changes. It’s very easy to keep adding new features when building software, but this is one of those occasions where we dedicated considerable time to simplifying, clarifying, and improving a core part of our offering. We look forward to your feedback!

Enjoy,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

Calling all developers.

It’s here – the long awaited GoSquared API is now publicly available. By leveraging the powerful API, developers can use the real-time website analytics data we collect to power their applications, regardless of programming language or platform.

GoSquared’s real-time analytics platform provides an overview of your website’s traffic at a glance, and allows you to dive down into very specific metrics about each of your visitors, pages, referrers and more. Our own applications are built on top of the very powerful API that we’re releasing today. We’re constantly developing and improving GoSquared – we want your imagination to be the only limitation to what you can achieve by building on top of our platform.

The versatility of the GoSquared API allows developers to create a diverse range of applications, from simple traffic counters on website pages, to mind blowing visualisations of a website’s traffic. We look forward to using the cool stuff you come up with.

Everything you need to know about the API is available on the new GoSquared Developer site. So what are you waiting for? Get stuck in and show us what you can do!

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

Need to see who’s been on your website in the last day? Week? Month? Want to monitor your website’s traffic without having to read a manual first? Want an elegant web analytics solution that updates in minutes rather than hours and works beautifully on all devices? Maybe you should check out Trends.

Since we first launched LiveStats, our web app for monitoring your website’s traffic in real-time, we’ve been determined to figure out how to store historical data at a large scale. Due to the number of sites we serve, and the speed at which we store data for quick retrieval, it’s been a huge challenge but we’ve finally figured it out.

What is Trends?

Trends is a web app for monitoring your website’s historical traffic data. All the information you need is easily readable and quickly scannable with bold graphs and readable lists. There’s a separate Widget for every metric (like referrers, visitors or top content), making it easy for the whole team to know what’s been popular and what’s not on your website.

Open Standards

There’s not an ounce of Flash in Trends, or any of GoSquared. We’re really proud of the graphing engine behind Trends. Because we haven’t used Flash, graphs in Trends display just as well on your desktop as it does on your iPhone or iPad. These are the best charts in a web-based analytics service anywhere on the web.

Customisable Interface

The interface of Trends consists of a series of beautiful, easy-to-use Widgets. You can set up every Widget just as you want – choose the time frame for your stats, whether you want to look at a graph, pie chart, bar chart, or just the figures, and even move the Widgets around. Trends will change to suit you. The whole interface will stay the way you set it when you return – every Widget, every state, every time frame will be remembered so you can jump back in where you left off.

Part of GoSquared

As we wrote recently, Trends may be a separate app, but when you sign up to GoSquared you get both LiveStats and Trends as part of the package. You can sign up for GoSquared for free, or if you need more pageviews there’s a series of affordable premium plans starting at just $9.99/month.

Check out the Plans and Pricing now – every plan has a 30 day free trial, and you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time.

Enjoy!

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team