A Pageview Alternative?

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Steve Rubel declared several weeks ago that the pageview is dead.

Below is a creative image Rubel had on his post:

Image taken from Steve Rubel

A few weeks later, Hitwise reported that MySpace had more pageviews than the Yahoo! homepage. That report resulted in a flurry of response, the main argument of which is that the Yahoo! homepage was ajaxified and took a big hit on pageviews. So, how can we account for the new mode of “traffic”?

The image above, taken from Jesse James Garrett’s seminal paper on Ajax, provides us with some idea of where we can capture pixel and gesture behavior.

For each call to the Ajax engine, we can track status like the following (comments are pseudocode):

xmlhttp = null

if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
{
xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest()
//begin tracking httprequest here()
//get new track XMLHttpRequest ()
//{
//create XMLHttpRequest;
//register tracking callback ();
//store user callback;
//}

//function tracking callback(state)
//{
//(state==4)
//{
//log tracking information here;
//call user callback
//}
}

In other words, for each poll to the server and response to the Ajax engine, we can track at that level. I think we only want callback’s that are of status==4, that is “loaded”, because that is what will eventually be rendered to the user.

This is all theoretical, of course. I think the big questions will be what constitutes an event such that it merits tracking. For example, is the Lightbox enough to count as part of this new metric? What about drag-and-drop events? It’s not good enough to say that what was once required to hit the server should count as part of this metric, because some of those items are seemingly small now (lightboxes, as an example).

I’m not an expert on XML or Javascript; but, the Pageview question has my mind thinking.

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