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Imminent Piwik 1.0 release may pose challenge to Google Web Analytics

A Frenchman living in New Zealand may give Google its latest greatest challenge with the release of Piwik1.0 in two weeks.
Written by Paula Rooney, Contributor

A Frenchman living in New Zealand may give Google its latest greatest challenge with the release of Piwik1.0 in two weeks.

Piwik is an open source web analytics platform that requires PHP-MySQL.  The software has been available for more than two years and boasts use on more than 50,000 web sites, its developers say.  As noted by my colleague Dana Blankenhorn two years ago, Piwik has been closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad serving alternative to Google Ad Manager.

Microsoft formed a multi-year partnership with OpenX last November.

Matthieu Aubry, the lead developer and creator of Piwik, left OpenX last February to focus exclusively on the web analytics platform.  "I quit OpenX in February to focus on Piwik, as it wasn't OpenX business objective to build web analytics -- sorry, no conspiracy," he wrote. [Editor's note: Aubry did not comment directly on the Microsoft partnership with OpenX. ]

Aubry noted that the feature freeze for version 1.0 culminates in the release of an update on Friday of this week and version 1.0 is officially scheduled for release in early to mid August.

"1.0 is coming in 2 weeks, so most features are there, we will be in feature freeze tomorrow for 0.9," Aubry wrote in an email in responses to questions from this blogger. " We have been very busy the last few weeks though, you can see main features looking at the changelog.

"Stability is very strong, we have a no bug policy," he added in his email. "Recent new features are: open Tracking APIs, custom PDF, worldmap widget (the guy built the GPL open source map for Piwik as it didnt exist), faster UI, new professional design -- thanks to sponsors and community feedback. "

The Piwik blog openly identifies ways in which it will differ from some commercial products -- which is useful information.

"Piwik 1.0 won't provide advanced web analytics features that can be found in other commercial products: custom report generator, custom segments and real time segmentation, funnel analysis, advanced ecommerce reporting, etc. ," the Piwik blog notes. "Some of these features could be built in plugins, but require significant effort and challenge to make them work with high traffic websites. We are building an open web analytics framework that people will use to later add these advanced features."

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