If you have visited this blog anytime after May 2nd, 2008 you may have noticed a pop up appear on your screen similar to the one shown on the right. Now, you might think this is a popup, an advertisement, perhaps even a malicious piece of code being executed on your system. The good news is, its none of the above. This notification is an invitation sent from my Woopra client, to you, to try and initiate a conversation between webmaster and blog reader.
Woopra is a sweet new analytics tool that goes a few steps above and beyond the Google Analytic offerings. One of those is the ability to initiate a conversation with the people who are browsing your site. So here is how this works.
If you use the WordPress Woopra Plugin, Woopra will have the ability to automatically tag visitors to your website. In order for visitors to go from being an anonymous IP address to name and email address, visitors need to leave a comment on your blog. When visitors leave a comment on your blog, they have to submit their name, email address and URL. Once this information is submitted to the website, Woopra strips that information and tags it to that IP address. Now you might be wondering if this is a BIG BROTHER snooping over you type of scenario. The truth is, it’s not. When you leave a comment, you are submitting that information voluntarily to the website. This is how Woopra explains it:
Virtually every site on the Web tracks users via cookies. Until now the only sites that had the resources to analyze and act on the data were large companies like Google and Amazon. Woopra brings this power to the masses.
So, if you visit my website and you previously left a comment, the following screenshot shows you what I would see:
My name is Jeffro on my own blog and that is what I have used to write a comment or two on the website. Also within this window of information is the ability to look up my browsing history on the domain, manually tagging the visitor, all of the information related to my browser, ip address ect, email address and you’ll even see my gravatar. That’s right, Woopra has built in Gravatar support which is pretty nifty.
So when a user browses jeffro2pt0.com and I initiate a conversation with you, this is what it is supposed to look like:
Two way conversation between web master/visitor. Now, I’ve gotten many reports that when user’s have clicked on the popup to initiate the chat, it doesn’t work. I have no idea why this is. It could be related to firewall settings on your computer or could be that, it doesn’t work. The good news is, the Woopra team is going to be reworking the chatting feature of Woopra. They plan on redesigning the Woopra popup as someone mentioned it looked like spam and they also plan on implementing a feature where site visitors can initiate a chat session with the web master instead of vice versa only. I think that would be pretty darn cool if that became a reality. That would eliminate the need for the shoutbox and it would give you one more way of getting in direct contact with me.
I hope that this information doesn’t affect your mindset in terms of commenting on this blog. If you don’t want this information to be available to me, you can always delete your cookies from your PC which will make you anonymous to Woopra. The personal identifiable information presented to me within Woopra is for my eyes only. So rest assured, your user data won’t be strewn across the net.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
It would be cool to see such a pop-up on my screen. :) I could bother you with what’s new in my life in a whole new way. :)
I think it’s great if you send that to someone who’s been on you blog enough to not be put off by it – I used to use a similar “invitation to chat” feature in a product called VisitorVille – a real-time stats montioring tool that is nowhere near as sophisticated as Woopra, but it’s certainly very entertaining in its own way (it shows houses and buldings representing the pages of your site, with people being delivered to your “town” (site) via buses that have the search engine name on the top, then you get to see the people going from building to building as they browse your site – very cute!) BUT whenever we’d use the “popup” it would freak them out and they’d leave in a hurry :D Naturally we gave up trying to initiate chats with them.
I tried to answer back the other day but it wouldn’t connect even with the firewall disabled. I look forward to the revised version.
@David Well, now that you have commented, Woopra has you tagged which means, if I see you on the site, I’ll send a chat request your way lol.
@Trisha Wow, that sounds like a very very visual way of presenting data to you. Almost sounds like a childrens book heh. You know, when I go to a site that has a live chat feature and they request to talk with me because I’ve been browsing around the website, I find myself ignoring or closing that window. That must be what is going on in this instance.
@Andrew Me to Andrew. Too many people having connection issues which makes one of the coolest features of Woopra, not so cool anymore.
Interesting, will definitely give it a try.. my sites are now pending autorisation :)
I saw the flag, but sadly I got the ‘could not connect to server’ error also. It’s a cool feature, but for all kinds of reasons I don’t think it will be very useful.
I use something called ‘Plugoo’ on my site, which lets readers contact me whenever I’m online. I’ve had it used once or twice and it works perfectly. You may also be interested in trying firef.ly, which was buzzing around Twitter the other day. I doubt this would lead to many worthwhile conversations on your site, but it could be a lot of fun.
I wish we could use this on our blog which is on an eCommerce site using wordpress, but then I really think it would scare people. In fact, we’ve tried other ways to tie buyer names to IPs because people don’t buy online, they buy offline…usually by phone. No easy way to do this, unless there is an IP from an unusual city and a purchase order to match that.