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Ben Tossell

Real Time Users - Add a real time user counter to your site

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Justin Bauer
I feel like I just got time warped back to 1995, awesome.
Fred Rivett
Maker
@bauermetal Thanks for the kind words Justin 🙌 😄
Tudor Baidoc
@bauermetal Exactly. It brings back good memories, when displaying your website stats publicly was in trend 🙃
Fred Rivett
Maker
@baidoct @bauermetal Thanks Tudor, glad you like it. It is pretty retro 😊
Jorge Bestard
@bauermetal we need some cool music in the homepage
Fred Rivett
Maker
@jorge_bestard @bauermetal Haha I like your thinking 👀
Fred Rivett
Maker
Hey all. Last week @marckohlbrugge launched https://highscore.money/ which went down really well 🔥 Following that, he sent out a tweet, asking if anyone knew of a good real time user counter to add to his site: https://twitter.com/marckohlbrug... _No-one did, so we made one._ Real Time Users is just that. We made it this weekend. I wrote a quick post introducing it, so feel free to look at that for more details. https://blog.wearecontrast.com/m... Feel free to ask any questions, we'll be about all day. Kudos to @mijustin for inspiring this too. You can read more about that in the post above ☝️ Also, check out the leaderboard to see stats on current real time, highest real time, highest all time from all sites implementing RTU (pretty much just us for now though 😛)
Mubashar Iqbal
@fredrivett @marckohlbrugge @mijustin Love that you built this so quickly! Looks great too!
Marc Köhlbrugge
@fredrivett @mijustin Super cool! Added it to highscore.money: https://highscore.money (traffic has slowed down quite a bit since though)
Fred Rivett
Maker
@marckohlbrugge Awesome, thanks Marc. Great to see it on there! 🙌
Dilyar Askar
@marckohlbrugge Loved ya on Startup Tv, really cool stuff here, keep it up!
Marc Köhlbrugge
Jeff Needles
When can we have this on PH @rrhoover?
Fred Rivett
Maker
@jsneedles @rrhoover 👀 😸 🙊
Ben Tossell
Hunter
@fredrivett and @mikeaag are an awesome duo and made another cool thing - simple and effective 😎
Fred Rivett
Maker
@bentossell @mikeaag Thanks dude! Excited to see how it goes down with the community here 👀
Roman Pramberger
This is honestly great. This can create a feeling that something is going on on mostly static sites. Which should naturally increase the user interaction.
Fred Rivett
Maker
@talkb1nary Hey thanks Roman! It's definitely an interesting experiment. As I wrote in the blog post mentioned above, it can feel a bit vulnerable adding it to your site, like any element of transparency I guess. I'd love to see a site like @buffer adopt this as part of their transparency push. Either way, it was fun to make, and interesting to see the reception.
Justin Jackson
FINALLY!! Well done! Love the simplicity.
Fred Rivett
Maker
@mijustin Thanks Justin! 🙌
Christopher Hannah
Short and sweet! It's the perfect implementation of a user counter, and you can add it to your site with just 2 lines of HTML. It's now on getQwiki.co
Fred Rivett
Maker
@chrishannah Amazing, great to see it on there Chris. Glad you like it :)
Ramy
Sweet. One idea would be to only show it when the count goes above a certain number (for people who want the social proof, but can't handle the shame of a low count).
Fred Rivett
Maker
@ramykhuffash Yep, good shout Ramy! I think there's definitely different ways this could go. Unsure if we'll develop it out more, depends on the demand really, but I agree the shame of a low count is a bit awkward.
Herman Schutte
@fredrivett awesome stuff! Just added to https://snapwidget.com. Hope you don't mind we modified it slightly, but still has a link to you guys in the text.
Fred Rivett
Maker
@hermanschutte Ooh that's a really cool implementation Herman. Very nice indeed. Gives me more thoughts about how we could make this even better. Thanks for using it! Out of interest, does linking to our site bother you? Would you prefer not to link? Would you pay not to? #intrigued
Herman Schutte
@fredrivett linking to your site doesn't bother me, but I think having a paid option of removing the link would be useful. Along with some other options like not showing when count is below X, and being able to set a message template as we have done. So that message can be hidden when count is below X. Stopping people from removing the link could be tricky, but you could perhaps check the styles applied with js to make sure it's being shown.
Fred Rivett
Maker
@hermanschutte Great suggestions, thanks Herman. Super insightful. That's the second time having an option when it goes below X threshold has come up. I totally understand that. Agree on more options around templating. Right now this is just a small side project so we're not too fussed about people messing with the JS, but we'll gauge whether we think there's something more we could develop this into and go from there. Any other thoughts at all be sure to let me know! 🙌
Alex Bauer
Really cool. I can definitely see using this in a future project
Fred Rivett
Maker
@alexdbauer Awesome, any questions or feature requests on implementing just let me know!
Samir Doshi
I've been looking for something like this for a week --- and BOOOM here it is
Fred Rivett
Maker
@samir_doshi Amazing! What do you want it for Sam? Why do you want to show real time stats?
Kareem Rahma
This is dope.
Fred Rivett
Maker
@kareemy Thanks Kareem 🙌
Jai & Milan
I love the website, and the app is clearly epic. One piece of advice I would have is that you say Styled and Plain, but I cant obviously see what these would look like. Would be helpful if I could.
Fred Rivett
Maker
@b4dp4ck Good point Jai, thanks for the comment. The plain one is basically with no styles applied at all, just the elements, with styled being shown on the right of that section. We can definitely make this clearer though. Appreciate the feedback! 🙌
Sajeev Aravindan
Cool product. But what does real time users mean? People who has opened the site in browser or the ones who are actively using the site?
Fred Rivett
Maker
@sajeev Hey Sajeev. So it's the unique number of people active on the site in the past 5 minutes. This means that if you go to a site with the counter on, it'll log you and add 1 to the number. If you browse around, or refresh, it stays at 1. After 5 minutes of inactivity, we deem you inactive, and remove you from the count. It's the same premise as Google Analytics Real Time stats, as far as I'm aware.
Stephen Campbell
I had a client ask me for this very thing. I was pretty puzzled. Now, I'm a hero. Thx @fredrivett!
Fred Rivett
Maker
@stephenalan Sweet! Love it when just what you're looking for pops up :)