Many of our publishers have opted to make all or portions of their real-time profiles public. See for example, gizmodo.com[0], stackoverflow [1], and Quantcast.com [2].
Pretty impressive, we used Quantcast at my previous job and I was really impressed that you guys did for free what other services charge top dollar for. (Nothing wrong with charging top dollar, of course, but obviously if there is a quality free product...)
Some quick questions:
1. This is way more than a simple Show HN hackathon demo. :p I'm assuming you (and others?) spent some time on this?
2. When you say "currently ... (unique visitors)" - is that uniques across the entire time period (120 seconds?) or uniques at one second? What's the window for that calculation?
3. I'm assuming you do NOT use Storm for uniques calculation - just a custom script/job?
1. Yes, myself and another engineer (@schimmy_changa) spent about 4 months getting it ready for public use after releasing the initial version internally.
2. That's unique visitors "currently" on your site, where that's defined as having visited a page in the last five minutes. The question marks provide more detail on the various metrics.
3. Everything is computed in Storm. The reach (unique visitor) calculations are done using some proprietary stuff I don't think I can talk about (although we're working on a more engineering-focused blog post that will have more of these details).
[0] https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-time/site/gizmodo.com
[1] https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-time/site/stackoverflow....
[2] https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-time/site/quantcast.com