I Want A Healthy Serving Of Statistics With My Social Networks

I live and die by statistics.

I use Google Analytics and Webmaster, Statcounter, Performancing Metrics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, AddThis, ClickTracks and other for that very reason.

I’ve got great statistics for my web sites, blogs, and RSS feeds; so why can’t I have them for my social networking and media sites?

The video sharing sites like Google Video and YouTube and Metacafe provide basic statistics on viewership for a given video. That’s helpful but not enough. But at least it’s better than the social networking sites, social media, and social bookmarking sites.

Most of these sites do not even have a function for adding code to your account and even if they do, as MySpace does, they do not allow you to add JavaScript code so that rules out using third party web analytics services such as Google Analytics to do the job. 

There are plenty of very good reasons to prohibit people from posting JavaScript code to their social sites, foremost among them the risk that someone will (and people will) post malicious code that will effect users who visit that page.

I understand. So instead, why can’t the MySpaces and Facebooks, and LinkedIns, and Flickrs, and del.icio.uses and Twitters of the world give me those stats themselves.

I doesn’t have to be anything fancy; the basics would do just fine: Number of unique visitor by hour, day, week, month and year, how they got to my page and where they came from, and if they used a search engine, which one did they use and what search phrase brought them to me.

That’s all I ask. I might even be willing to pay a little for the service.

Right now, the only indicator of how highly trafficked your social media account is, are the number of friends or contacts you have or how many outside sites are linking to your page. But that doesn’t count how many people are actually visiting your page. You could go out and find a bunch of friends but they may not ever visit your page again after the initial friend approval.

The volume of comments you get on your content is a better indicator of popularity and engagement with your page but that still offers no concrete numbers.

I want to know a lot more than that and I don’t think I’m alone.

So here’s a plea to the social networking and media sites please add some basic statistics to your services before some smart developer figures out a way to provide that service through a JavaScriptless widget.