Review: Ego
by Robb Lewis
April 7, 2010
Overview
If you're like me, you're probably constantly looking at how many followers you have on Twitter or how many visitors you've have to your website. If this is the case, then Ego is definitely the app for you. Ego lets you see an overview of your stats from Twitter, Google Analytics and more.Features
- Have multiple accounts from the same network
- See stats for;
- Twitter
- Ember
- Feedburner
- Google Analytics
- Mint
- SquareSpace
- Vimeo
To get started with Ego, you need to add some of your accounts. Press the settings icon and choose the type of account you want to add. Input your credentials, and if available, give the account a memorable name (such as your website name). Once this is done, you're ready to check out your stats.
The main screen of Ego shows a widget for each of your added accounts, which is coloured depending on the type of account (e.g. the Feedburner widget is red). You can press each widget to get different information depending on the type of account it is and I will go through most of them (I don't have a Mint or Squarespace account) here.
The three 'social' types accounts you can add are Twitter, Vimeo and Ember. The Twitter widget, shown in dark blue, shows your most recent tweet and how many followers you have. You can also see how many people you follow and how many tweets you have...errr...tweeted. Vimeo's widget shows how many times your videos have been played, how many people follow you and the amount of comments and likes you have. Finally the Ember widget will display how many photos you have uploaded, as well as following and follower totals.
Now onto some slightly more 'professional' services. Put your Feedburner credentials in to see how many subscribers you have as well as how many more subscribers you have gained or lost in the last 24 hours. If you have gained or lost any, this is indicated by a green arrow to the right of the widget. If you use Google Analytics to track visitors to your blog or website, Ego has you covered. Pageviews and visits for the past day, week, month and year can been seen from the orange-coloured widget.
As I said above, I don't have a Mint or Squarespace account, but if you do, both of these widgets will show you visits and pageviews in a similar vein to the Google Analytics widget. The order of your widgets can be changed through the settings app as well as giving custom names to some of the services.
The Breakdown
The Good:
Ego is a great app for giving you an overview of your stats in the order you choose. The different colours make it easy to distinguish between each service and adding or removing accounts is easy. Also, the interface for Ego is beautiful and really shows how apps should be made.
The Bad:
I really like Ego but there are a couple of small things that can be annoying. Firstly, I would like to be able to choose what I am shown first for each widget (e.g. show pageviews this week rather than today). With some of the website analytic services, stats can take up to 24 hours to update, so being able to see stats for a different period as default would be great.
Another problem that I feel would affect many users, including myself, is the lack of support for YouTube. Ego offers stats for Vimeo but not YouTube, and as we all know, the latter is far more popular and I feel this would increase the appeal of the app to a larger audience.
