Reflections on one year

I've been looking forward to this post for a little while now. Jonathan Levitt did one of these one-year pieces last year and his enthusiasm and hope for the future really impressed me, even though at that point I was only a prospective hire making the interviewing rounds.

Ah, Fall 2006. Seems like eons ago. But time is relative on the web. I was speaking with a client last week and she mentioned that she had only been in her position for about 6 months, but she felt like she had built up about 10 years worth of learnings.

I can relate. Things move so quickly now in the web environment that time itself seems compressed. In calendar time, vendors haven't really been measuring online human behavior for all that long; the WAA itself was born only 3 years ago.

But the pace of change is our space is remarkable. Status quos are constantly being disrupted, best practices redefined, and goals realigned; we are in a perpetual state of reevaluation. Doing business online means always being on your toes, sensitive to the slightest tremor in customer behavior, and this is all good.

One year ago, we were a small, privately-held company, happy to have a nice, tidy little stable of loyal clients. Now we're a growing, vociferous, disruptive dynamo--the enfant terrible of the web analytics industry.

So best wishes for the future to everyone who has a stake in this frenetic but beautiful digital space. And don't worry if the skeptics raise the specter of another bubble. The parameters are different this time. The web is indispensable to us all.