On measuring engagement

This was intended as a comment on Registered users? Here's the stat I want to see… Growth of Engagement but apparently San Francisco has gone off the grid and I don't want to lose the thought.

In that post, Charlie O'Donnell noted that many sites report overall user registrations, which tend to be a nice large number, but not user engagement or growth of user engagement. This is actually pretty easy to track with cookies, but few sites do this, relying instead on a solitary cookie to track both account information for the user as well as the active session. If they do use session cookies, it's primarily to support the application, eg PHPSESSIONID, and not for audits and measurements.

What I wrote into the typepad bit bucket:

Many sites conflate their session cookies with their account tracking cookies, meaning they only can track when someone "logs in" and resets the cookie. Far better is to split the account cookie from the session cookie, and set the session cookie to expire every hour (well, some unit of time) and then extend the expiration time with each ensuing interaction of the user.

Now, this is sort of the thing that Google have recently come under criticism for (dropping their account cookie time down to a rolling two year period, expiring based on the user's last interaction with the site); however that was specifically an account cookie (containing all the information needed to track the individual) vs. a session oriented cookie (which should contain only the information you need to track an individual session, which you then may or may not want to tie to an individual user depending on your application and ability to gather and analyze the data).

2007-07-25T1600Z

• I neither bought nor read the latest Harry Potter book, keeping up a tradition going back a decade.
• Still slogging through the after-effects of moving, unboxing various boxes and throwing much stuff away.
• I decided I no longer needed the ticket stub from U2's 1984 appearance at the Aragon, or the stub from Yes' appearance at Poplar Creek in 1983.
• In keeping with my weird rant Everything is detritus , I threw away hundreds of photographs. A hundred photos of my old family home, random photos of Poughkeepsie in the '90s, my Benet Academy Trouper of the Year award from 1984. Just. Not. Necessary. To. Keep.
• Our Australia trip is still on. Frisket and Sailor will get dropped off in Boston around the 12th, we leave for SFO on the 14th. After a night in SFO we flap our arms madly for 14 hours to SYD on the 15th. After a couple of days in Sydney, we hit Melbourne for a week. Still looking for advice, ideas, cautions, etc. for Melbourne.
• Finally got the new Apple Airport access points set up earlier this week after getting the new software installed. Apple seems to be taking the Microsoft approach to software with its Airport Utility (more complex, less useful). Biggest complaint: they removed the ability to bulk upload MAC addresses for use in access control. The function is still there in a limited braindead fashion, but I'm not manually reentering 30+ MAC addresses.
• I did not buy an iPhone. Still mostly liking my Nokia E70 of which I shall post a review some day.
• Both dogs were sick over the weekend. I will not go into details. They are both better now. I personally am glad to not have had to walk up and down multiple-flights of stairs all weekend.