Shootitlive is one of those startups that has been quietly doing its thing and getting very impressive traction. In case of Shootitlive, perhaps not so quietly, as they have over 75 newspapers from Europe as their customers and their solution displays images to over 20 million monthly unique visitors. As told by @arcticstartup
Read the full article at http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/10/11/shootitlive-hits-300-million-monthly-unique-viewers
The fascinating story of how @Shootitlive went from kick-ass demo to international expansion as told by @Pingdom
Read the full article at http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/10/01/shootitlive-kick-ass-demo/
A long-standing issue with Google Analytics is its problems with using cookies for storing the ID of a particular visitor across page views. This is problematic for embedded widgets that often work within an iframe, where e.g. Safari per default disallows cookies so called 3rd party cookies within iframes. A widget maker is only left with the option of injecting GA on the parent page and risk a collission with the site owner’s own GA.
We have come up with a technique for tracking widgetviews, instead of pageviews, of our widget across sites and in most modern browsers.
How we do it
Tracking a visitor is done by generating a unique clientId, i.e. a random and unique ID, that is used as a name for a particular visitor (or browser session, that is). To track views across a site this clientId must be persisted somehow. Per default GA previously stored this in a domain cookie, and there are a multitude of techniques for “passing on” this piece of information across site-borders.
The new Universal Analytics provides the ability for the developer to keep track of this clientId themselves. So, if we just had a JavaScript function that gives us a unique ID that is persisted for a viewer of our widget, across sites — we’re home.
Here it is:
To initialize GA in the widget, you make this create call instead:
In regards to user privacy I’d argue that this is better than many other solutions. We store our cookies on a single domain specific to our widget rather than shadily passing it on from domain to domain.
I’ve simplified our actual implementation of this somewhat in this post, so if you want to know more just tweet me @emilisto.
Isn’t it wrong to track people across sites?
By-passing the cross-domain policy of tracking begs for a few words on privacy. The illicit cross-domain tracking that has been much called out usually takes the form of site-owners tracking users across seemingly unrelated sites to gather and correlate data in ways the user could not foresee. Adding cross-site tracking to an embedded widget is on the other hand different in an important way: if the same widget is embedded on two different site the visitor can actually see that this is a shared piece of content and if he or she accepts being tracked on one site, tracking a single widget use across sites is analogue to tracking a user across a single site.
Shootitlive usage has skyrocket in 2013 with an average of 5 million photos and 50,000 videos being viewed each day.
Martin, Eivind and Emil
On an average day
5 million photos and 50,000 videos are being viewed
1,500 new photos uploaded
100 new videos uploaded
50 new live feeds created
We made it super simple to get your Shootitlive metrics into your Omniture, Google Analytics etc. Have your techies email us.
As of today more than 70 newspapers in Northern Europe use Shootitlive in their coverage. Among our latest customers are TV2 in Denmark, Sydsvenskan in Sweden and MTV3 in Finland.
Thank you for an awesome start of 2013!
//Martin, Eivind and Emil
Hey, I guess you heard Instagram launched support for video last week.
You can now search and publish Instagram videos to your site in a matter of seconds. Search for any keywords, then pick and choose videos or photos to publish, as they appear on Instagram in real-time.
Seriously – try it out, it’s a lot of fun just watching the #hashtags develop!
//The Shootitlive Team
Sidebar
When your visitors hover or interact with the player it will expand with a sidebar showcasing your most popular Shootitlive galleries.
It’s all about visitor engagement. During our beta, video and image views increased with 10%.
Sub-galleries
During a live event, you can choose the best images and videos to create new galleries on the fly.
As live events tend to get huge and include many, many images and videos. It can be hard for the visitor to find the best ones. When you create a new gallery with highlights, the new gallery will be visible in the sidebar.
New ad-format
For Shootitlive customers displaying advertisements in the player, you’ll be glad to know we got rid of the old overlay format and replaced it with the much improved sidebar format.
Feedback from customers as well as advertisers tells us this is a hit. Ads are always in screen and being just next to the content, visitors pay more attention to the ads. If you’re interested to start monetizing your content, don’t hesitate to ping us at hello@shootitlive.com
Sidebar info
Have look at featured feeds at our front page to see the sidebar in action!
//The Shootitlive Team
Photo: Leif R Jansson / SCANPIX
This Monday the Nobel Prize ceremony takes place in Stockholm. Scandinavia’s leading picture agency Scanpix will live publish photos via Shootitlive during the entire ceremony and the subsequent banquet. If you are interested in publishing the live photo feed please contact Jonas Jonsson at Scanpix.
For Shootitlive customers we can pipe in the Scanpix feed to your own account, where you can rearrange, add or delete media files.
Jonas Jonsson
Key Account Manager Dagspress
jonas.jonsson@scanpix.se
Tel + 46 8 738 38 12 Mobil + 46 73 084 10 46
Scanpix, Gjörwellsgatan 30, 112 88 Stockholm
Hey, you can now publish Instagram photos to your site in a matter of seconds. Search for any keywords. Then pick and choose photos to publish, as they appear on Instagram in real-time.
This also marks the release of our search bar. We want Shootitlive to be the place where you collect, organize and publish images from all different sources.
Instagram is the first service but we will soon add support for many other sources.
Seriously – try it out, it’s a lot of fun just watching the #hashtags develop!
//The Shootitlive Team
With the release of Shootitlive 2.0 we also released the ability to integrate external apps with Shootitlive by using our API.
Icemanmedia’s Openstore is a editorial image and media system, were editorial staff can browse and download photos archived by their photographers and photos from external picture agencies. Openstore have customers such as Aftonbladet, Expressen, SVT and the Swedish Police.
Openstore users can now, with a click of a button, send photos from Openstore to their feeds at Shootitlive and have the photos published on the sites within seconds. This will save newspapers a great deal of time, especially while providing live coverage of remote events with material from picture agencies.
Openstore were able to integrate with Shootitlive in just one working day. Contact us at hello@shootitlive.com if you want to integrate your app with Shootitlive.
If you don’t already have a Shootitlive account, you should request one here
Let the live publishing begin!
The Shootitlive Team
We accidently came across a major security problem when we were configuring iMessages on OS X Mountain Lion. We certainly don’t want to encourage illicit activities but full disclosure is usually the best way to handle public security issues.
This is a serious bug where you quickly and without any hacker skills can take full controll over someone else’s Apple ID when you’re connected to the same WiFi network. This mean you can gain full access to that person’s iTunes and App Store accounts, by adding your own email address as a verified address and then changing their password and security settings.
The technique used is called a “Session Fixation Attack”, meaning that the user’s session which should be associated with and confined to the user’s computer and browser can be reused and exploited by a 3rd party.
You stay safe from this by not sharing or receiving links to Apple ID. If someone asks you to log in to Apple ID, make sure you don’t open a link to https://appleid.apple.com/