Woopra — Crack for the Web Stats Junkie

If you’re at all obsessive about who’s visiting your web site, what they’re looking at, and whether or not your visits are trending up or down or sideways, then my advice is don’t — don’t even *think* about — hooking up with the Woopra beta program.

Let me be more clear: Woopra is crack for the web stats junkie. To say merely that Woopra offers a real-time view of who’s on your web site and what they’re doing there is to short-change the product by 99%. It’s got eye-candy of all sorts, from its geographical world-view to its jazzy trend-lines to its scrolling ticker of current trend factoids. Oh… and did I mention that you can start a live chat with a web visitor if you like?

Sure I’ve got some bones to pick… nits, really. For example, while Woopra *does* have a Mac client it requires the latest beta of Java, which in turn runs only on latest version of OSX, to which I haven’t yet migrated. And so I’m running the Woopra client in a Windows XP window in Parallels’ Coherence mode. (Come to think of it, that’s pretty slick, too.)

So go ahead and take a look at Woopra if you must… but don’t plan to get anything else done for a while.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you.