Posted by Aerik on 07/16/07 19:51

At the risk of exposing myself to this flamefest:

Let's redefine the problem a bit: If one wanted to broadcast some
number that has some tenuous tie to reality, and the purpose of that
number was to to be a cool marketing thing that give some fuzzy
indicator of the popularity of a website, one could code a solution.
I would go about it like this: send a cookie and log pageloads
associated with that cookie. Calculate some number based on the
number of browsers (cookies) that have loaded pages in the last x
time. If you wanted to make it a little more tightly tied to reality,
you could even look at the the distributions of visit per cookie over
time, so see how many page loads are generally associated with a
cookie for a short period of time, and refine your x time
accordingly. Is this the same as "currently online"? No. Do some
people think a number a like this is nifty? Yes. If one required
users to be logged in (say, in a bulletin board system) one could very
easily and truthfully broadcast a number that says "currently logged
in users". Also, just a nifty little number and some people think is
cool.


Best Regards,
Aerik

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