[sinaiman]

Hummingbird's premise seems like it kind of misses the ball, it certainly would be cool to see a real-time stream of analytics, but what would you actually do with that feature? Seems kind of gimmicky, but I agree with the author in that it could find a home in some other analytics package.

Definitely a solid list of interesting options in the analytics space, thanks for the share.

[andrewjshults]

According to their tech talk about building it (http://www.slideshare.net/mongosf/real-time-ecommerce-analyt...), the original goal was to collect real time data to use in picking products for their gift page. I also heard that the other driving force behind building it was to have a visual way to show visitors to their office what Gilt's noon traffic spike really looks like/means. The core part is under the MIT license on github (https://github.com/mnutt/hummingbird) so it could easily be picked up by some of the other packages out there.

[mnutt]

As the author of Hummingbird I'm happy to see it get exposure, but it doesn't serve the same purpose as most of the other packages on the list. It doesn't tell you where you should optimize your site to get the best conversions.

The purpose of Hummingbird is mostly just emotional--it feels really cool to watch your site go from 2 pageviews / second to 400 pageviews / second.

At Gilt Groupe, this happened daily and on an order of magnitude larger scale.

[destraynor]

Hey Mnutt - that's really cool of you to reply. It's a really impressive piece of technology.