any webdevelopers here?

[Floris]

For quitte some time now I'm busy developing an application that can record user input on any website where it is installed and then it will send the userinput to a server to be able to replay the whole visit at a later point.

The webapplication has been given the name "Usabiliy Analyzer" which probably still is a bit too generic. Have a look at it at:
http://www.usabilityanalyzer.com/server/

Most of the basic fundamental features are already present, but there's still a lot to be done. Till this point I'm the only one developing it. Since I'm dealing with a mouse-arm (RSI) / carpal tunnel thing it's hard for me to bring the project to a good end alone. I do have a brother that can help me out with some commercial things since he is a webdeveloper/web security expert. Cutting it short: he is willing to help around with everything arount it, but not the webapp software itself. Till now he didnt do anything productive yet and is just standing at the sideline with the occasional cheerings I need.

I just made a list of what still needs to be done and found out it will take me at least 9 months to a year to become anywhere near commercially presentable. (when done giving away memberships for free too probably)

I think I really need to get others to help me finishing it so I have to code a lot less by myself.

So... who here is a webdeveloper? And if you are, can you give a short description of the skills you have?

My question is: could you possibly be interrested to aid this project with some of your time and skills?

(do know that I can't pay your for your work yet, only possibly at the point when the project becomes commercially viable enough.)


Just opinions are welcome too!

[SinbadEV]

Crimminy that is an awesome tool... I'm not "that kind" of web developer and I'm already working on a project... could I link this to my industry contacts because I know of at least 3 people who could use the finished product and one of them might be interested in helping you "bring it to market".

[TradeMark]

why are you publically displaying users IP addresses there?

i wouldnt want any webpage spying my mouse movements. if you ever going to do that, you must tell that to the users with huge window... then again, nobody is going to come back to that site for sure.

you might get lawsuits on that anyways... remember the one webpage that was spying which websites you had visited ? how much did it cost to him?

i find this extremely non-legit.

[SinbadEV]

why are you publically displaying users IP addresses there?

i wouldnt want any webpage spying my mouse movements. if you ever going to do that, you must tell that to the users with huge window... then again, nobody is going to come back to that site for sure.

you might get lawsuits on that anyways... remember the one webpage that was spying which websites you had visited ? how much did it cost to him?

i find this extremely non-legit.

While I see your point and will grant that ethical websites should likely have users opt-in to the usability tracking... he's not doing anything really wrong... if you didn't want a website to know where your mouse was hovering then you should have disabled javascript.

[TradeMark]

if you didn't want a website to know where your mouse was hovering then you should have disabled javascript.

thats like telling "if you dont want a virus on your computer, you shouldnt have been using computer at all, so its your fault."

[SinbadEV]

if you didn't want a website to know where your mouse was hovering then you should have disabled javascript.

thats like telling "if you dont want a virus on your computer, you shouldnt have been using computer at all, so its your fault."

That statement that you quoted was meant psudo-sarcastically.

The followup point is that any website could already be tracking your mouse cursor at any time already and I don't really think that would be breaking any laws...

that said: oops, looks like someone is already doing it http://www.clicktale.com/

@Floris were you aware of this competing service?

[Floris]

why are you publically displaying users IP addresses there?

Because well ehh... normally this info will only be visible to the owner of the tracked website. In this case me and my brother are the owners of the currently tracked and displayed websites. And this forum post is the first publicly notification of the given URL.


I wanted it all behind a password sooner but my brother wanted to do this himself and I respected that, but till now he didnt found the time to do it. Today he called me after I notified him about this forum post and he will get us a CVS server and create the user login part so it's not an issue anymore.

Meanwhile I'll work on a alpha version to make availible for friends to try. (removing all unfinished features and fixing some bugs)

i wouldnt want any webpage spying my mouse movements. if you ever going to do that, you must tell that to the users with huge window... then again, nobody is going to come back to that site for sure.

you might get lawsuits on that anyways... remember the one webpage that was spying which websites you had visited ? how much did it cost to him?

i find this extremely non-legit.

that said: oops, looks like someone is already doing it http://www.clicktale.com/

There is your answer. I get this response a lot but it simply comes down to the fact that it's not really privacy infringing since it is your own website you see things happening. And while you can see where someone hovers with their mouse it's usually only informative in usability aspects. Even with porn websites. )

The only thing questionable is viewing how a form is filled. You possible see someone removing their harsh comment in a textfield and typed something better instead. But still, I can't really think of much abusement here.

@Floris were you aware of this competing service?

Yes I am.
But I still think there's room for our webapp, since it will operate a bit diffrently. We'll offer more a single page webapp interface featuring extensive filtering options and use of AJAX. In that way we'll be providing things slightly diffrent than their webservice.
But I must admit when I found out about them I was impressed at the scope of info they can generate.

[SinbadEV]

But I must admit when I found out about them I was impressed at the scope of info they can generate.

Not to mention how pretty the heat maps are... :D

good luck with your project.

[Cheesecan]

I think you are on the right track with this idea, industry is quite interested in these things so they can measure user experience, especially now when business decision-making tools are being put out on the net.

[knorke]

pretty cool. and scary i guess.

[Floris]

Not to mention how pretty the heat maps are... :D

Lol, and that my friend is open-source written by some other author!

(but they could have made adjustments to that. I didn't really investigated that heatmap project yet)

[Floris]

Oh I just checked a dutch tech website that reported in a newsitem:

(freely translated:) "In the US a judge (remarkably) has denied the fact that an ip-address can be linked to a person. This happend in a case that the author of a copyrighted work (porn) wanted to force an ISP to give the private info of a P2P user. The reason behind it was that that you can't know for sure which member of a household or compagny did it or even somebody could use somebody elses wifi. Although it also seemed to matter because it was 'adult-entertainment'.
They do question this reason will also apply in other P2P cases though."

[Floris]

Anybody interrested in getting a free account?

(after our login/user account system has been coded)

[Tobi]

Mouse cursor tracking can also be used to uniquely identify the person using the website.

I've heard there is research on what mouse movement is typically exhibited by certain classes of people, so that by just hovering over a page, that page can already know if you probably are a nerd, a grandma/grandpa, a yup, etc.

(Of course it's all statistics but combined with the huge amount of data your browser leaks to each website you visit you surely are uniquely identifiable. (Browser brand+version, operating system name+version, resolution, language preference, installed plugins+versions, IP address, etc...))

Anyway the project sounds cool, I'll check if someone is interested.

[Petah]

i wouldnt want any webpage spying my mouse movements. if you ever going to do that, you must tell that to the users with huge window... then again, nobody is going to come back to that site for sure.

you might get lawsuits on that anyways... remember the one webpage that was spying which websites you had visited ? how much did it cost to him?

i find this extremely non-legit.

Your kidding your self.
Lots of website do this kind of thing, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Thats not the only thing they are tracking to. They track if you open emails, if you click links, what website you came from, what kinda of OS your using, screen size, internet speed, country, or even town of origin, etc.

[Petah]

I am a full web developer working with PHP, Apache, HTML5, JS etc. Our company has been looking at these kind of RIAs for a while now.

There are lots of existing implementations available for this already.:
What makes yours stand out?
Is it API level or application level?
What kind of pricing schemes are you thinking about?
What are the hosting requirements for it?
Are you going to sell it as a service, or something that is installed?

[Cheesecan]

Anybody interrested in getting a free account?

(after our login/user account system has been coded)

Sure. How does it work? I include a JS somewhere on my pages?

[Floris]

There are lots of existing implementations available for this already.:

Yes thre are, but only a very few that do the same. Most of them do just old-fasioned webanalytics and with optional campaign tracking. But not really recording and replayign actual visits. Clicktale is the only one I know of that basicly does the same thing as we do.

What makes yours stand out?
Is it API level or application level??

For now it's still application level, but API level could be considered aswell. I think the Usability Analyzer could stand out in being a webapp instead of a webpage divided in diffrent sections with reports. We could even advice our customers to also use a service like google analytics beside ours.
So we just try to stay put at our core business and do that impressively well.

What kind of pricing schemes are you thinking about?
What are the hosting requirements for it?
Are you going to sell it as a service, or something that is installed

There will be a limited free option, but the pricing depends on some specific features (providing the API possibly) and bandwidth use. Since hosting will cost a lot of server and bandwidth use.

Floris wrote:

Anybody interrested in getting a free account?
(after our login/user account system has been coded)


Sure. How does it work? I include a JS somewhere on my pages?

yes, just a few lines of JS

[Floris]

To see what a website can do to make an unique visitor out of you:
http://browserspy.dk/


My webapp does record some unique systems specs, which will be bound to one or more ip's but thats just limited to resolution, browser, os, lanuage. I could add some more later.

[SinbadEV]

When someone mentioned that one could categorize their user's based on the information reported by the browser I thought to myself: "Yeah, if the mouse doesn't move at all but somehow click events are being reported, the user is a paranoid geek"