posted on July 15, 2009 by Devin
The only problem… they aren’t new.
Reading through Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite Blog last week, it appears that Microsoft announced new integration of Windows Live Hotmail and Bing. While it’s fine and dandy for the two products to work together, they announced a feature that has existed since February. Heck, they even own up to it:
We announced in February that Windows Live was piloting a new feature unique to Hotmail we’re calling “quick add.”
They went on to say that they were adding Bing integration to the “quick add” feature (the currently available options for which can be seen to your right). In reality, nothing at all changed with this feature. Don’t get me wrong, this could be a very useful thing, but every single option that is there was there yesterday, and as I recall, has been for a long while. Obviously, before June it was powered by Live Search, but as far as I know, it worked for the past month too.
Apparently, there’s not much new in the Hotmail department.
posted on March 12, 2009 by Bryant Zadegan
Before Google Analytics, most content publishers relied on effective-but-obscure third-party analytics tools for measuring web traffic. AWStats, still used by many, is one of the best tools for this purpose since it tracks hits server-side instead of through JavaScript (which some browsers actively strip, thus reducing the quality of information provided by Google Analytics).
Google Analytics came along, and (thanks to the assumption that Google is great at everything) singlehandedly convinced many publishers to rely on Google Analytics instead of tools available to most publishers on their web servers. Granted, Google Analytics was easier to access and read, but it still didn’t provide as much raw data as most web developers and content pushers needed.
Then came Microsoft’s own analytics tool, tied to its beta advertising program, titled “AdCenter Analytics.” If you take a look at the html source for this page and look at the bottom, you’ll see that we’ve got both Google Analytics and AdCenter Analytics running, which provides us with a unique insight into how they both work. Keeping it brief, Microsoft’s tools provided far more usable information and was generally easier to navigate than Google Analytics, and while I use both, I’m likely going to keep using AdCenter for as long as possible, which brings me to the subject of its closure.
Microsoft put out this email to all AdCenter Analytics testers, which you can catch after the jump.
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