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What if Google decides to make Google Contact Lenses
From the Gamification course in Coursera- what a brave new world this could be if we could create minute contacts of Google Glass?
Sight from Sight Systems on Vimeo.
Understanding the Google Cloud
Google has a lot of services, so I really like this simple explanation of them. Though I may want a clickable , one more level of detail to make it interactive (esp Google cloud SQL vs Google Big Query- love in a tech documentation??)
Source-
https://cloud.google.com/resources/articles/storage-overview
I wish technical documentation had more examples of lucid , infographic like explanations.
Dashboard Design: Google Activity
I quite like Google’s monthly email on account activity. It is the Google way to offer free services, as well as treat users as special, that continues to command loyalty despite occasional exasperation with corporate thingies.
See this dashboard-
Notice the use of Bigger Font for overall number of emails as well as smaller bar plots- I would say they are almost spark lines or spark bar plots if you excuse my Tufte.
The medium range font shows persons sent/from statistics, and the color shades are done to empahsize or de-emphasize the metric
Colors used are black/grey, green and blue coincident with the Corporate Logo.
However some of the JS for visualizations need to be tweaked. Clearly the hover script ( an integral part of Dashboard design ) needs better elucidiation or formatting)
I would also venture my neck and suggest that rather than just monthly snapshots, atleast some way of comparing snapshots across periods or even the total time period be enabled- rather than be in seperate views. This may give the user a bit more analytical value.
Overall, a nice and simple dashboard which may be of some use to the business user who makes or views a lot of reports on online properties. Minimal and effective- and in keeping with Open Data- Data Liberation Principles. I guess Google is secure in the knowledge that users do not view time spent on Google services as a total waste , unlike some of the other more social 
websites they spend time on.
Google’s Product Strategy
- Copy an idea from existing product. Make worse interface, but give more freebies. Do not charge money ( or charge vastly reduced ). Launch without warning.
- Write a blog post every three month on the launched product
- Watch product lose money as they did not charge any/some money to begin with.
- Close the product down without warning.
- Repeat.
RGoogleAnalytics Package Updated! Works for OAuth 2.0 #rstats
Only the Linux version of the updated package is here , but for Windows users (like say 80% of the USERs) you can just source the 2 R files within the package sub structure after unzipping the downloaded tar.z file TWICE. The package takes care of taking you to the correct link for authentication after the line access_token <- query$authorize(), you need to
1) sign in to your Google account
2) click grant access (blue button)
3) click exchange tokens (blue button)
4) paste the access token at the prompt specified within the R console
access tokens stay active for 3600 seconds !
library(rjson) library(RCurl) source('C:\\Users\\KUs\\Desktop\\RGoogleAnalytics_1.2.tar\\RGoogleAnalytics\\R\\QueryBuilder.R') source('C:\\Users\\KUs\\Desktop\\RGoogleAnalytics_1.2.tar\\RGoogleAnalytics\\R\\RGoogleAnalytics.R') query <- QueryBuilder() access_token <- query$authorize()
ga <- RGoogleAnalytics() ga.profiles <- ga$GetProfileData(access_token) ga.profiles query$Init(start.date = "2012-06-18", end.date = "2012-12-18", dimensions = "ga:date,ga:pagePath", metrics = "ga:visits,ga:pageviews,ga:timeOnPage", sort = "ga:visits", #filters="", #segment="", max.results = 99, table.id = paste("ga:",ga.profiles$id[3],sep="",collapse=","), access_token=access_token) # 4. Make a request to get the data from the API ga.data <- ga$GetReportData(query)# 5. Look at the returned data head(ga.data)
Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org
Interested in using R for Web Analytics? Use it from here http://code.google.com/p/r-google-analytics/
Great work by the Google team (Michael Pearmain et al) and Tatvic team working together!
Easier Tagging for E Commerce by Google Tag Manager
Ok I guess I am a bit late to this, but I really like the concept of Google Tag Manager https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ and the fact they have a WordPress plugin ready http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-tag-manager/. What does it do? It integrates all your tags on websites on one dashboard. So much easier Web Analytics for marketing people who dont want to learn Reg Ex , JS etc.
IT-friendly – Google Tag Manager has lots features to set your mind
at ease—like user permissions, automated error checking, the Debug
Console, and asynchronous technology. So everything runs efficiently,
with no unpleasant surprises.
• Quick and easy – Users add or change tags whenever they want, to
keep sites running smoothly and quickly. Tags are managed with an
easy-to-use web interface, so there’s no need to write or rewrite site
code following implementation.
• Verified tags & templates – Google Tag Manager makes it easy to
verify that new tags are working properly, so users don’t need to call on
IT to check the tags. Built-in tag templates and automatic error checking
also prevent tags with improper formatting from even being deployed
on your site.
• Swift loading – Google Tag Manager replaces all your measurement
and marketing tags with a single, asynchronously loading tag—so your
tags can fire faster without getting in each other’s way.
Related articles
- Tagging just got easier: Built-in templates for popular tags in Google Tag Manager (analytics.blogspot.com)
