Mark Fowler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > I've almost finished the very first version.
>
> Cool. Now for some more ideas...
>
> If you really, really want this to be a 'killer app' then you need to hack
> in user tracking sytems. This means tracking:
>
> When users enter a system
> What pages a user goes to
> What links a user follows
> Everytime a user sees a product
> Everytime a user adds a product to a basket [1]
> Everytime a user buys a product [1]
> When users exit a system [2]
>
> In some kind of loggable format that can be fed into a suitable data
> mining application (Either by slapping the data in a huge database
> directly or some easily parsable plain log file.) Note that this gets
> messy when you need to start abstracting out users (so we prevent our left
> hand that knows about what people are doing from knowing what our right
> hand does, which is their names and physical addresses.)
>
> Companies are currently falling over themselves to get this kind of data
> out of their systems. And they are paying *silly* sums of cash to buy
> software that does it. Doing this could easily leapfrog perl into a very
> favourable position in the market.
>
> I'd be more than happy to help work on this kind of thing, including
> working on the back end to integrate it with at least one of the
> industry standard software solutions out there [3].
>
> Later.
>
> Mark.
>
> [1] including cost at this time and quantity.
Ooh, I hadn't thought of that. I'd abstracted pricing out to a
pricing engine that could operate on the item's base cost but hadn't
thought about the price changing during the lifetime of the basket.
--
Piers
