Ryan McFarland

I have used a few different services to track the visitors to my myspace page. I still rely on my AXS install to provide the most reliable data about visitors. You can read about how i use that here.

ProfileViewsPlus - This embeds a quicktime movie into your page which guarantees that you won’t get IDs for every visitor. The script also has a gif image that seems to load placeholders for “unidentified visitors” but people that view your profile that are not signed in to myspace will show as unidentified also. I like this service because it doesn’t load any self promotional images or unwanted links to mess up your profile. A huge bonus is that it displays the IP address of visitors so I can use it to connect a face to an IP address in my AXS logs. One huge downside (other than the quicktime embed) is that the site seems to be down a lot.

SocialSpy - This service’s code is a tiny gif image. They don’t load any self promotion or ads either. The service seems to have decent uptime and seems to log most visitors to my profile. The only downside is that this service relies on you and the other members to identify each of the visitors to your profile. So if you install the code and then later get a comment from someone you can look at the date and time and try and match the two. I have noticed a consistent problem with the times logged not matching the times displayed on myspace so it can be a little tricky.

Trakzor - This site loads a few text ads for their other services and loads an animated image to promote the service. I don’t like either of those tactics very much. This functions similar to socialspy - you need to identify visitors. They do give a location as pulled from the IP address but don’t give you their IP. Setting the time is very intuitive and accurate. An added bonus is the mashup with google maps that displays the location of the visitors to your profile. A sleek interface is an added bonus. [edit: It has been reported that Trakzor was blocked from myspace. But Dave (the owner of Trakzor) has been kind enough to straighten that all out.]

Trackspace - This myspace tracking service does not load any ads or self-promotional text to your profile. It allows you to identify visitors to your profile if they can’t figure them out. It gives you an ip address and a physical location to help figure things out also. There are some ads on the pages and right now a picture of President George W Bush is showing up in the middle of the recent visitors right now. This service allows you to send notices to cell phones if someone you have identified visits your profile. I have no real use for this but some people might find a reason to enable it.