Alexa, Compete, Crunchbase… all-in-one!
I’m a fanatic of charts. A week ago, one of my friends in the VC world throw me a use case - He is tracking a bunch of startups which he wants to compare traffic and unique visitors.
Here is the template we come up with:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/Web2Tracker.new
Neat? This template allows tracking of 12 groups of websites, max. 8 in each group. For each site entered, links to its respective Alexa, Compete, Crunchbase, Del.icio.us search, Google Blogsearch and Technorati search are automatically generated with simple spreadsheet function: hyperlink() and concatenate().
Even more interesting, by entering group number in respective cells in sheet “Alexa Charts” and “Compete Charts“, respective Alexa/Compete charts can be loaded into the spreadsheet. You can configure the options to load different type of charts such as: Alexa’s reach, rank and pageviews; Compete’s unique visitors, attention, average stay and page/visit, etc.. This was done with a EditGrid unique feature called dynamic remote image, which load image according to URL stored in a cell. The URL can be dynamically generated with spreadsheet functions such as concatenate().
Here’s a few interesting notes you may like to take away:
1. The Chart URL in websites (including Alexa, Compete, Y! Finance, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc. etc.) can be easily understood. The parameters are usually embedded in the URL, e.g.
http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/www.techcrunch.com_uv_310.png
The above will show the unique visitor (”uv”) chart of Techcrunch (www.techcrunch.com) of width 310px (”310″). You can easily guess it right after playing with the compete site for a few minutes.
2. With understanding of the parameters in URL, you can easily write a concatenate() function to concatenate the “parameters” into the URL. e.g.
=concatenate(”http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/”,A1,”_”,A2,”_310.png”)
This will give the above URL if A1 is storing “www.techcrunch.com”, A2 is storing “uv”. If A1 now change to “www.readwriteweb.com”, the URL will be pointing to the respective chart of Read/Write Web instead.
3. To insert dynamic images, you click “insert” -> “images…”, then input the cell reference of the concatenate() result, e.g. B1. So, whenever A1 change to a new domain or A2 change to a new chart type, the images will be reloaded automatically.
4. Loading images from other websites can be sometimes questionable. The web2.0 world has a nice name for it: mash-up. In EditGrid, we just want to provide a generic features for our users to make those charts work for them. I hope this is ok and there won’t be an “Alexaholic incident” happen to us. 
5. To copy the above templates for your own use, just add “.new” at the end of the URL and hit return. Yes, turning an EditGrid spreadsheet into a template is as easy as this.
Have fun with EditGrid.
P.S. Some new features currently in our pipeline can make spreadsheet templates like this a few times more powerful. There will be a lot coming from EditGrid in 2008!