So Mint got launched. The product site is gorgeous and you can almost taste the minty tang on your tongue as you surf around. Watch for it appearing in CSS Galleries over the next few days.
Regarding Mint itself: First things first. It also looks fantastic. But then its designed and built by Shaun Inman so thats hardly news. It also works like a dream but, again, its designed and built by Shaun Inman so, again, thats not a surprise.
What _is_ a surprise is how limited it is functionally. It picks up on browser share, visitors, searches. Its a Stats programme. Call me cynical but I was distinctly underwhelmed. Whats new here that justifies $30 per site?
Most disappointingly of all, you can’t configure it to hook straight into your server generated log files. Instead its dependant on Javascript to source all stats. Thats not good. Or as reliable as getting data straight from the source.
Now I know some people will say that its very simplicity (which seems to be becoming synonymous with ‘lack of standard functionality’ on the web these days) is its attraction – thats its easy to just get the most ‘vital’ data and go. Hm. What web stat application can you _not_ do that with? Personally, I’d rather have all the options I can and then invest some time in (gasp!) learning why they’re important and how to use them.
I don’t mean to knock Shaun Inman here. He’s a web designer/developer that the vast majority of us can only aspire to be as skillful as. Maybe thats why I’m so disappointed by this. The ‘Inman’ brand usually comes with an assurance of innovation and ‘must have’-ability (sorry for the word mangling).
I use Awstats on all my sites and the sheer power is hard to beat. Its also very well organised, dead easy to use and a doddle to find what you need. Its also free.
Mint on the other hand seems like its aimed at a ‘vanity’ audience who just want the quick warm glow of seeing which of their mates linked to them. Thats all very well but whats the point in that other than a quick ego-trip? A tool like Awstats by comparison allows you to develop a brand new skill – learning to read log files in order to better your SEO skills. If you’re in business then the better your SEO skills are, the more money you make. If you’re an agency or in-house developer then the better your SEO skills are, the more money you make for your company and the better your chances of career advancement are. How can you lose?
One area of interest might be Pepper which is basically an API to allow 3rd party developers to develop plugins for Mint. But to be honest, if I’ve already paid $30 per site when I can get 100 times the power for free then I expect much more functionality to be in the core product from the word go.
Is there some aspect I’ve missed here? Something that would blow me away?
Left Brain Right Brain 
Well yes and no I guess…
I agree $30 is sort of expensive especially given the fact that this is a per SITE license. However as you said yourself, it looks great. Looks are always a great marketeer as you probably know. Then there’s the limited feature-set. I think this is actually the nicest part about it. I know AWStats very well. It’s indeed powerful but it shows an awful lot of stuff I’m not at all interested in. Also it’s results are extremely affected by referrer spam which is really the largest pain in the ass on the internet since the first email-spamming occurred. That’s why the javascript solution is so nice. You’ll lose about 1% of your stats but you get rid of tons of spam in your statistics. I personally rather loose the 1% instead of getting the 80% extra ‘stats’ induced by spam.
I plan to write a more in-depth review of Mint since I couldn’t resist getting it anyway even though $30 is a lot of money for what it offers.
For now some quick observations: it needs curl which is nonsense. In fact I already changed the code to use normal PHP socket connections to do the same thing. Also it needs MySQL which is a sign of lazy coding. It’s perfectly possible to store Mint’s stats in plain text files and I intend to prove it once I get the time to do some coding.
It’s a mixed bag really. I don’t know what to think of it yet. It’s nice on on hand but there are definitely issues among which pricing is the most important one.
Just my $0.05
I am viewing Mint as the elegant (and more accurate) replacement for those god awful hint counters of the 90’s. I can see Mint as something that might appeal to a client who wants to know thier “hits” but doesn’t want some big overblown geek interface to deal with.
I agree with some of what you say though. Would I have a mint? I am intereseted in the product but can’t see any point for me.
It’s all sexiness that I can’t afford and can’t really find a use for.
As for awstats, I must mention that it’s not only free as in free lunch but free as in freedom too. It’s “free software”:http://fsf.org in the best GPL fashion.
It’s an excellent piece of marketing. Beautiful site, screenshots, name. Everything.
I have no use for it, but I want it.
“I can see Mint as something that might appeal to a client who wants to know thier “hits†but doesn’t want some big overblown geek interface to deal with.”
Then download Shortstat – it’s great.
Love the recent posts.
Also have no need for mint. I check my stats in my host every couple of week mainly to check for 404 errors and where I’m getting hits from and why. Love the look of it and the site looks great but not worth the $30 to me right now.
I agree that Mint has been hyped well beyond its worth. Yes, the design is lovely, but $30 per site is ridiculous when you can get comparable products for FREE. I use StatCounter (www.statcounter.com), which is a freeware, third party provider and it seems to do everything Mint does.
What is it with all the hype among the “top-tier” web designers these days? I don’t even bother listening to 37 Signals anymore, since they’re selling a different version of a to-do list every week, and I’me sick of reading glowing reviews about Mint everywhere too! What’s next? Zeldman.com email accounts selling for $2 each???
Hits for hits sake. There’s plenty of stats programmes out there that offer more functionality for free even though they look like they’ve cannoned out of a baboons backside. Sure it looks sweet but nowadays surely any client with a real interest in their website needs more information than that on offer. We’re not talking about a full blown metrics analysis package such as Nedstat’s Sitestat but a nicely designed app along those lines would be worth paying for. Nice try but no After 8
I like Mint. It’s simplicity will be of interest to a few clients of mine who don’t want to pick through the detail offered by Urchin, which I also have installed. And I’m happy because it’s up to the minute unlike Urchin which I have set to run nightly (and running it more often would eat processor time).
All the best,
—
Ian
It’s mint.
(is that only a UK thing??)
Wow, the community backlash is interesting.
Even without having used the demo it does look pretty underwhelming. The shmick marketing/design lead me to expect something that would blow away the competition… web stats is an area that really needs fresh approaches in design, but sacrificing so many features isn’t the answer.
Well, I’m kind of surprised about how many people have some level of agreement with me. I thought I was going to get torpedoed on this post!
John I think has identified the role Mint could play but also the puzzling aspects of it – who would want a glorified hit counter? Hits are fairly meaningless stats.
Andy also identifies something I meant to mention but forgot – other than the lovely design and the price tag, whats the difference between Mint and Shortstat?
I’m suprised people have been so quick to go for mint when Measure Map from Adaptive Path is yet to be released. Check that – yet to be even described. Rumours to date suggest it ranges between something that will compete with Mint to something that will complement it. That being the case, I’d like to see its features list and price first before plonking down AUS$50…
Although the hype was overblown, I’ll defend Mint.
I bought it the first day it was available and I’m happy with it. I don’t think it’s meant to compete with Urchin or any other full featured stats package, only to complement them. When I need to see what’s going on with my site month-to-month in great detail, I’ll look at Urchin. But for getting snapshots of short term trends in easily digestible format, Mint rocks. It’s configurable and extensible in a way that shortstat isn’t. You can also easily switch views between aggregates and single entries.
If the question is “what does Mint track that package x doesn’t?” the honest answer is “not much.” For me, Mint::Urchin is analagous to Basecamp::Microsoft project. I still keep MS Project installed, and it does a lot of things Basecamp never will, but Basecamp meets 80 or 90% of my needs in a simple, intuitive fashion. Same with Mint.
The pricing: $30US per site isn’t much if you’re making money on a site, or if you’re paid to build the site. I agree that I would not want to install Mint on a bunch of vanity sites though. Shortstat is still free, isn’t it?
Hi ‘since’ :o)
I see your point re: Basecamp/Project and thats definitely the best analogy I’ve heard – wish I’d thought of that!
Agreed. That’s a perfect analogy. It seems like a lot of the Mint-bashing this week fails to grasp that Mint isn’t supposed to be Urchin/AWstats/et al.
I’m sort of surprised there’s still so much “every app must have the same features and if it doesn’t then it’s crap” mentality running around the design community (especially considering the advent and recent rise of companies like 37signals and their less is more way of doing things.)
I quite like Mint. Because it doesn’t mess around. It just does exactly what it is supposed to.
Quote: “Mint on the other hand seems like its aimed at a ‘vanity’ audience who just want the quick warm glow of seeing which of their mates linked to them.”
Well it does seem to be aimed at the Blog arena, and seeing which of your mates, and your mates mates have linked to you is to some extent, what it is about.
However I do see where you’re coming from. Once you look past the polish there is no outstanding features paricularly – but hopefully the Pepper API will provide some in time.