Meta refreshing other people’s services

Posted by stuart as , , ,

I got up early this morning (2.30am) to watch the doubles in the Davis Cup semi-final between Australia and Argentina. Whilst I was up, I thought I’d go to the FIBA website, and follow the scores in the Women’s World Basketball Championships final between Australia and Russia. (I have a bet on the game)

As is the case with most “live update” services on sports websites, tracking the scores is done through a page which opens up separately, and is a “pared down” page, with little in the way of graphics etc, as these pages use a meta refresh, usually somewhere in the vicinity of 60 seconds, they are trying to keep their bandwidth usage down to manageable levels. This is fair enough, as all I really want is a live update of the scores, anyway.

There’s a couple of things which are quite interesting about the FIBA live score service. Firstly, the page is really pared down - there’s very little in the way of superfluous content, just the scores.

Secondly, although most sports site refresh their scores every 60 or 90 seconds, this one does it every 30 seconds, which is great from a users standpoint, but means they’ll go through a bucket-load more bandwidth.

Thirdly, and perhaps the most interesting, is their use of Google Analytics. Every time that page re-loads, it shoots off and has a bit of a yack with the Analytics website. Now I’ve always thought that stats on pages which re-load automatically are pretty much useless, about the only stat you’re going to get of any value is the number of uniques, as a lot of people will load up the page, then walk off, so page views are irrelevant in this scenario.

How does Google feel about this use of their service? Surely an organisation as big as FIBA can afford their own stats tracking software? Imagine what this might be costing Google - I would think that whilst this final was being played (Australia winning 87-71 with about 3 minutes remaining - w00t!), there’s be at least a couple of hundred thousand people using this service, multiply that by 120 hits and hour on the Analytics service, and you start to get what I mean.

Note to FIBA - AWstats is free with a $4.95 a month hosting account, I’m sure you can afford to sort something out on your own.