

Rate my startup: oyoLive - Real-Time Mouse Tracking and Live Chat - thomas-st
http://beta.oyolive.com/accounts/register/?invitation_key=hn

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thomas-st
Hi HNers! My name is Thomas and I study computer science in Switzerland. Today
I am launching the oyoLive private beta. oyoLive is an analytics tool that
allows you to see mouse and keyboard actions of your website visitors in real-
time. Combined with a live chat, you can offer support for customers currently
on your site. The beta is free, and I'd like you to test the software on your
websites and also let me know what use cases you see for using it. Looking
forward for your feedback!

~~~
mikemol
A point of worry. You mention tracking keyboard actions. Does that include as
they're typing into text and password fields? If you're trying to avoid
capturing that kind of data, how can you be sure you're filtering out, e.g.
custom JS-driven text widgets?

~~~
thomas-st
Right now it captures any text field. I am planning to implement a filter so
the website owner can choose which fields they don't want to capture. An idea
would be also to specify an entire area of the page that shouldn't be
captured.

~~~
mikemol
Is it plausible to turn off all text capture, or use an 'opt-in' approach to
fields and hooks, rather than an opt-out?

(edit: On the part of the site administrator, I mean.)

~~~
thomas-st
Planned (no capture for password fields and an opt-out for other text fields).
An option might be also to just display stars on regular input fields, so you
could see that users are typing, but not see what they actually type.

~~~
mikemol
And it doesn't capture keyboard input except from known text widgets? My
paranoia rests with pagewide onKey* hooks and the like. I'm not a JS guy,
though, but I'd assume those are possible. That's why I was curious about
total opt-out of key trappings.

~~~
thomas-st
Currently it only captures known input widgets, i.e. no global key strokes.

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mhp
This looks very cool! My one concern would be popping up a chat window to a
customer and saying "Hi, it looks like you're having trouble with our site"
which could come across as creepy. But maybe they'd have to initiate the chat
and I'm not understanding this correctly..

~~~
thomas-st
Chats can be initiated both by the website visitor and the website owner, so
the website owner has the freedom to choose whether to initiate chats. It
looks like sites which use the chat actively have improved conversions though.

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avand
Thomas, really nice job. Looks the resolution for mouse tracking isn't as
precise as I'd like it to be. I'm not using the chat feature, but see this as
a great way to do remote usability testing.

It's critical that it not slow down our site, so I'll keep an eye out for
performance issues.

Feel free to hit me up directly for more feedback. avand at avandamiri dot
com.

~~~
thomas-st
Thank you for your feedback!

Regarding the resolution, there is room for improvement as the server is
currently located in Europe and the website visitor only sends new mouse
positions when the previous request returns from the server (in order to avoid
multiple requests that may be stuck).

oyoLive should not slow down the site, as it loads asynchronously, but tell me
if you notice any slowdowns.

I'll contact you soon to hear more feedback from you. Thanks so far!

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uvince
I finally tried it and really like the mouse tracking and some of the other
insights, like resolution.

1) Is there an easy way to share mouse recording videos w/ colleagues?

2) Small Bug: Links to external sites recorded in the movie, namely Paypal,
make weird things happen in new tabs.

Once again, great job, I'd like to try the chat in the future, too.

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bengl
We've seen a few of these sorts of services pop up lately. Do any of them
(including this one) fall back to XHR long-polling, etc. when WebSockets
aren't available? I'd like to see data for _all_ my visitors, or at least most
of them.

~~~
thomas-st
WebSockets are only used for the admin panel, and there is a Flash-based
fallback in case the browser doesn't support them.

Visitors send most data using simple GET requests (and use long-polling for
the chat). This works with all major browsers. So there is no need to worry.

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paraschopra
Interesting app! What's your data storage policy? Do you store recordings
forever -- I am sure recording data eats up data at a breakneck speed. Also do
you store recording data on an external site such as S3?

~~~
thomas-st
There is no storage policy yet for the beta. I was thinking of storing the
visits for a certain period of time, with the ability to save selected visits
forever. The beta will give me an idea on how much storage I should
anticipate. I am currently storing data in MongoDB's GridFS.

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photon_off
This looks very nice. Is there any way to play back recordings of user
activities? I generally don't have time to watch my users in real-time, and
sometimes there might not be anyone online.

~~~
thomas-st
Yes, of course. You can use the Recording tab to play back older visits at any
time. Also, you can play a visit from the beginning and it will automatically
switch to real-time mode if that user is still online.

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backroomcoder
Just signed up so I will see how it goes over the next few days. Definitely
looks like it has potential.

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chaosmachine
This looks like a nice project, but what's with all the 1-hour-old accounts
leaving comments down below?

~~~
thomas-st
I invited some of my developer friends to support my project. I didn't know
who has a HN account and who doesn't, but these are all real people.

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matttah
It doesn't look like you can change your password on your account after setup.

~~~
thomas-st
Try <http://beta.oyolive.com/accounts/password/change/> I'll place a link to
this page on the account page.

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wkasel
Wow - now that could be a seriously powerful ordeal!

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arunpattnaik
Looks very interesting. Can't wait to use it!

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nazarl
Cool! I'would like to see that on live too.

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benashkan
Great product. Already installed it.

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d_hoffmann
Fantastic idea! love it!

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clavinator
great webapp Thomas! I'll definitely sign up for the beta.

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piromiro
that's neat! does it affect site load speed?

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SteliE
this looks super cool!!! nice job...

