8 Ways to Sunday

Urchin, the premiere web analytics company that was recently acquired by Google, has given web hosting company TextDrive the shaft. After TxD’s recent move to a new hosting facility in San Diego, they lost their ability to provide Urchin log analysis to their 5,000 customers. The site license for the software had belonged to The Planet, which had formerly managed TextDrive’s servers.

TextDrive staff have repeatedly tried to contact Urchin since the move and purchase a new site license, but calls have not been returned. They actually can’t convince Urchin to take their money! Meanwhile, all those TextDrive customers have no way to track traffic to their web sites. The response of the TextDrive community has been fascinating to watch. Rather than looking to Urchin’s competition for a solution, they’ve decided to become Urchin’s competition.

The TextDrive user community is rich with tech-savvy designers, coders, usability experts, and professional geeks of all stripes. They’ve banded together to create their own visitor tracking and log analysis program, which will combine the real-time overview of Shaun Inman’s Mint with the in-depth analysis features of Urchin. As fellow TextDrive member Andrew said:

…don’t awake a sleeping giant like the TextDrive community. They’ll have a killer large-scale stats package built on Rails and fully deployed in under six months.

This is the power of a knowledgeable, passionate, and motivated (not to mention pissed-off) community at work. This is why I love being hosted at TextDrive.

(Props: TextDrive Community Forum and Simplicio)

Updates

• 9/19/2005 @ 1:23 AM — Since TextStat was already taken, the name of this program is still up in the air. The temporary code name “Anemone” has been chosen.
• 9/30/2005 @ 8:53 AM — One of the Anemone dev team, giving an update on the project in the TextDrive forums: “It’ll be coming sooner rather than later. It will kick all kinds of ass. It will be both powerful and simple. It will drive its enemies before it, crush them, and hear the lamentations of their women.” Pretty strong words to use against Google, Urchin’s parent company. And you thought Steve Ballmer was harsh.