Wildly Appropriate

Who's Got The Scoop On MySpace Analytics

Apr 4, 01:46 PM

As with most things MySpace, the more I dig into the question of how a "regular joe" (that is, somebody that's not in an advertising relationship with MySpace) goes about tracking who's viewing a MySpace profile page ... the more filth and rottenness I discover. Here's something that says it's a tool for doing MySpace tracking that's quite likely a spyware mule. Okay... Softpedia says it's not spyware. And here's another tracking service with the stink of AdSense Farming all over it. What's a legitimate outfit like mine s'posed to do with all this? The images on our page are not used on any other site, so there's logfile stuff we can do to try and sessionize use of these images and to discover referrers. But I want more. I want user environment variables. And myspace friend IDs. And of course, I want absolute unique visits.

Earlier today I bumped into a bit of server trickery from Knowingart that I'd like to try out:

because Myspace censors HTML, (a good reason not to use it) you’ll need to get fancy if you want to take your tracking a step further. Code a script that looks like an image to Myspace, but actually it’s a PHP script with a .jpg extension.

Example: http://www.knowingart.com/whatever.jpg could be a PHP script that outputs a .jpg image. But before the script displays the image, you can capture some useful server “environment” info.

What else should I be aware of in terms of best practices for web analytics in MySpaceland? Will the Knowingart trick make the MySpace gods angry? A comment left on a blog I've been following of late was dead-on about the effects of spending alot of time and effort on things in the MySpaceOsphere: "I bet the guy who put this together took a long, long shower afterward"....

Update: Some links about this matter

• GA thread on using GA in MySpace (it no workie)