Who’s Amung Us: great idea, poorly supported

About 2 months back we decided to try a 2.0 widget called Who’s Amung Us. The premise is simple enough: you embed their code, and you can track traffic live on your site.

The service isn’t a full blown analytics package, the best you get is a running total of live stats, but it fits in nicely on the flip side of Google Analytics; it’s not a full blown alternative, but it’s not half way in between like a range of other services either. It does a basic task, and in theory it should be good at it.

I know: free service, I shouldn’t complain. But this is a service with an A-list recommendations list. I don’t begrudge the fact that there are times when the service won’t work, or it has to go down for maintenance, but more and more lately its been as useless as tits on a bull.

Here’s one shot from today, I missed getting the time out shots:

The Who’s Amung Us blog hasn’t been updated since September 23, so what ever is going wrong isn’t being communicated, and that’s a sure sign that things aren’t great at any service, particularly when the problems have gotten worse over October into this month.

A couple of people have suggested alternative services on Twitter, if you have any recommendations let us know. I’m not necessarily against paying for a service, but I also don’t want load time issues for running a live script either. Free would be better again.

Who’s Amung Us = fail.