Unscientific Browser Statistics

In my previous post, Apocalypse Survival Guide, I posted a link to the slides using Google's URL shortening service. I had a few reasons for choosing that specific service:

• Its short URLs are permanent.
• The service is unlikely to be under odd political disputes.
• It detects malicious websites & warns you.
• It provides neat statistics.
• It generates a small QR barcode image to share the short URL.

From the statistics link http://goo.gl/info/XHgI you can see some interesting things like times & dates of clicks, referrers, countries, browsers & platforms (operating systems / devices).

As of this writing, the link to the guide I posted had 62 clicks but shows an intriguing trend in browser usage:

• Chrome: 11 users
• Firefox: 11 users
• Safari: 7 users
• Mobile: 3 users
• IE: 1 user
• Opera: 1 user

What's even more interesting is the platform usage:

• Windows: 16
• Macintosh: 10
• Other Unix (since Mac is considered Unix): 4
• iPhone: 3
• Linux: 1 (that's probably me!)

So people are using Chrome & Firefox more on Windows. That's heart-warming & gives me hope in humanity.

The next time you want a URL shortener, use Google's and check out the statistics by adding /info/ in the middle of the short URL (see the link above).

I used bit.ly's service but didn't like its statistics page though it links to Twitter & Facebook public feeds for reference, but it doesn't always show the numbers or referrers correctly.