I am trying to rid my life of Google services and products. I mean they are everywhere now – harvesting my personal info and whatever other data that they can get from me, and its just getting too creepy.
Today I was looking for an alternative to Google Analytics, and found Piwik!
For those of you who do not know what Analytics is: It a service ran by google that tracks everything about your websites. Such as user visits, what the users do on your sites, how long they visit, and what they read. All that info is set and stored in Google’s database. It is helpful to webmasters and site owners. But what its really doing is helping google mine more data from users, and meh!
I posted the following on several forums, and decided to go ahead and post it on my site.:
Has anyone here ever heard of Piwik?
Turns out that its an open source alternative to Google Analytics, and works just as good.
I just took google analytics off all of my sites, and installed Piwik, which is basically php and mysql based.
It was actually pretty simple to install and get running. You install it like you would any other php script (forums, etc), then add your sites to it, and insert the tag into the footer of your sites.
I haven’t had much time to play with it since i just installed it, but so far its picking up hits instantly, and working quite well.
The load is actually much faster than Google Analytics. If anyone has ever used Analytics then you know about the random pauses and freezes during page loads while your site connects to google. That is now gone with Piwik! 
The admin UI is similar to Google Analytics. So you’ll easily find your way around.
Even if you don’t use Analytics, and are interested in visitor stats on your site, i’d suggest over the awstats and others that usually come with cpanel and such.
I’m excited to rely on one less google service.
quick download and install here
http://piwik.org/
provide feedback. i’m interested to see if others enjoy this as well.
