Whos.Amung.us is a neat widget we came across tonight that some websites will want to add. It shows the number of concurrent users on a site at any given time.
Clicking on the widget also gives good stats on the recent URLs people visited as well as popular pages. Like Sitemeter (which we also have in the bottom right of the sidebar), it doesn’t do anything Google Analytics or other stats services don’t do – but it is an easy way to share more data about your site with your readers.
There is also a firefox extension that shows the total number of readers on your site at the bottom of the browser at all times.
We’ll keep it on TechCrunch until it manages to take the site down for the first time (every widget we add seems to do this eventually).
truly one of the better designed stats-widgets!
I wonder if it’s tracking unique users or if it’s just showing how many views it had on the past 8 minutes?
Looks very cool,very WEB2.0 widget!
Well, I’ve tested, it ain’t track precisely for unique… I’ve tested on a page that I both launched IE and firefox to access it and it shows me two. TC is having high traffic, so you won’t notice it
It looks like a hacker counter to me.
I wish it was unique, I have almost 600 on right now and it’s 7AM.
wow 600, you have more than what TC has. But it isn’t unique, you can get a new widget and put it on a trafficless page to test
I’m going over 1000 now, I don’t want to crash it but does anyone know one that tracks uniques?
“amung”? What kind of mung spells it that way?
No doubt this will be very popular. it has a good look and bloggers love to see instant stats like that.
It’s a nice idea, But essentially it’s a hit counter with a twist.
I doubt many people will assume that the meaningless number represents how many people are online at any one time. There is nothing to suggest that,..
This was like at first site – the only flaw was the lack of customization options, there are cases where one would want it to blend in with the design / color theme of ones site.
Imagine how much better a white background with green fonts would have looked on TechCrunch
Of course, if your site has a black 3d background with red fonts, you’re in luck
I have over 5k users online now and it’s not even slow, doesn’t look like it’s going down
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LOL, I must say this is a great widget. At least a tenth of the tracked pageviews I see when I click the widget are the (very) few porn posts.
Either someone, or some people, is feeling very happy right now, or there are some extremely disturbed people reading this blog.
By the way, I would just like to say that I am a consistent reader of this blog, although this is my first comment (I couldn’t hold it in, I had to share it with the rest of the viewers!). I love your posts, keep up the good work!
Here’s a better one: http://www.hitscount.com
It tracks unique AND can show various other stats too and some cool designs.
it IS the number of simultaneous unique users on your site right now.
I tried it earlier this week (I think LifeHacker had a post about it) and after running it a short time, their entire site was unavailable for almost a day. I didn’t “take down” my site, just didn’t work. Also, if you don’t like the look of the button, one option is to set the height and width to ‘0′ and just use the Firefox plugin to track the number instead. I tried that and it worked fine. Of course your viewers can’t get the benefit of it, but I really just want if for my own curiosity, and don’t think it really adds value for the visitors to my site.
To the above poster, due to popularity we moved the site to a much higher capacity infrastructure and it should be good for many many more simultaneous users.
This is bad, you could copy techcrunch counter id and put it on your website, ta da, now you have 1000 users
Two things about this vs some other hit counters and widgets:
- Because its’ an image, if their service goes away or hiccups, all your users see is a broken image, as opposed to something like the YPN outages a few months back, which completely broke pageloads because they couldn’t execute the inline javascript.
- Note that the code they generate for you is a random string. It works just as well for any random string, which makes sense given how they’re tracking uniques for 30 minutes and then tossing the data – there’s no reason to keep an index into that data. Armed with this knowledge, you can generate your own random hashes, and this is a key differentiator versus other hit counter services, where you have to enter your url/site/email whatever and they emit a nonce built just for you. I was able to build a demo PBwiki plugin to add this widget to any of our 200k wikis in about 5 minutes. Pretty slick, and certainly a good first effort.
So… who are these guys?
Maybe I’m biased (click my name) but I really don’t see what is so neat about this. It’s just a standard counter, except it’s “the last 8 minutes” instead of “all time”.
I can’t help but think money was changed hands for this writeup
I don’t think this statement, “It shows the number of concurrent users on a site at any given time” is correct.
Worth of mention alongside this is GoStats for some serious stats summaries.
Ohh! I think so..
It’s kind of neat to see the list, and when it dynamically updates it’s cool also.
I just don’t seem to get any useful info from it ?
Am I missing something ?
Seems like the most useful thing is the number on the widget as it reflects recent activity.
Actually it seems that Sitemeter.com is down for the last couple of days, Sitemeter has also been accused of adding Spyware cookies to every single visitor (not just the site operator). This move will cause a lot of folks to leave Sitemeter and switch to other services like statcounter.com
So the who.amung.us also down? Showing zero even on techcrunch ?
Not only are they down but you cannot even email them. All you get is too many connections and a bunch of mySQL errors. Perhaps you need to look for quality not quantity.
Looks like myspace already blocked this one. Who knows why. Its getting to be stalag 17 over there
just add “.gif” to the end of the 8 char key in the tag, then it should work
so instead of …widget/xxxxxxxx make it …widget/xxxxxxxx.gif
Too bad: Whos.Amung.us never works when you need them – they’re offline half the day!
Yes Michael! Whos.Amung.us = shit! Doasen’t work! Before was great, but now…
Do not put this widget, your site visitors can steal your precious keywords from your landing pages.
I prefer this one:
http://www.populatetheweb.com
whos.amung.us is the best! I’m use on all of my blogs..
Whos.amung.us is Down at this time