Friday, April 21, 2006
Gather and Analyze Information with Sidewalk
byWhen FeedRinse was launched, I was excited because it meant somebody close to home had finally released a Web2.0 app. This past week saw the launch of the first Fargo-based Web2.0 entry, as far as I am aware of anyway. Sidewalk allows you to very easily set up a form and collect the data on a hosted server. Not only do they sport a 2.0 design, but the domain name is something to drool over, captureimportant.info...how great is that?
This will be great for small sites and blogs that want to collect email addresses from clients. Sidewalk handles everything for you on the thinking and storage side. You just create your form which they have made incredibly easy to do and then paste the resulting tiny javascript code on your site where you want the form to show up. That’s all there is to it.
Since starting Sunblog we’ve been amazed at the wide range of countries that people visit us from — on a sidenote we’re also fascinated by shiny objects. So, to test out Sidewalk, I created a simple form asking for name, country and a URL for you readers to fill out. I won’t do anything with the data it collects, well I might take a look at your site if you include it. Once you’ve got data collected, Sidewalk gives you a simple view of your data that you can export to do whatever you want with.
Here is the form I created, feel free to fill it out if you’d like. I’ll post results next week if there are any submissions.
Sidewalk is a very nice product that compares very favorably to similar services I’ve written about before. It will set you back $7.99 a month to use, but that is a pretty fair price if you have no other options available. A free trial is available, so don’t be afraid to check it out. You will be amazed at how simple it is to set up and start using your new form.
