

The three secrets of business analytics (no rocket science here) - baha_man
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3002-the-three-secrets-of-business-analytics-no-rocket-science-here

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DenisM
Any thoughts on first-party analytics vs. third-party?

I have my own data collection framework for iOS apps, which I hesitate to give
up, but I lack in exploration and visualization tools. The easy way out is to
use someone elses, but then I lose control over what gets collected.

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noahnoahnoah
(I wrote the original post)

There are tons of great third-party tools for data collection, and in some
cases, you'll be hard pressed to come up with a better home-grown alternative
(you probably won't write your own Google Analytics/Clicky/etc alternative).
In some cases, even when there is a third-party tool available, it makes sense
to write your own - the costs for some of the per-datapoint tools can get
quite high, and you don't always want to be sending a high volume of data to a
remote server (I'm a _huge_ fan of things like statsd, which are very
lightweight).

Where there aren't good third party tools is in pulling together all of your
data sources in a way that you can easily compare them against each other.
This is hard to do, since everything has a different API, but I find to be
really valuable when you can get it done.

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tannerc
Ah yes, 37signals, masters of anything related to online business. Really
though, their approach to work and business is one I wouldn't mind seeing
other companies mimic.

