I’ve turned my eye to doing some selective time tracking. This class of software is most often integrated into billing applications.

I’m looking at a few Mac apps:

• Marketcircle Billing $50
• On The Job $40
• TimeLog $25 ($75 with billing)

And a couple of web services:

• FreshBooks $360 /yr
• Harvest $144 / yr
• toggl $60 / yr

The spread in pricing of the web services surprised me. How does FreshBooks justify being so much more expensive?

Those prices are a year’s worth at the “solo” levels of these services. Except toggl, these web services are magnitudes more expensive than the Mac applications.

Not because it shows how we we are doing (and will show when we screw up), because of the opportunities for others to use this knowledge and to collaborate.

When I chose to work for IBM coming out of university, access to IBM’s people, resources, and great knowledge were significant to my decision, but how empowering they are I did not appreciate until leaving the giant four years later.

Working for small companies Mercurial Communications, and then Flock, I really learned how important knowledge about customers, target markets, collaborators, and competitors is, but gained a taste of how to be creative in the absence of this knowledge.

That is when I really started to appreciate software as a service — although it already seemed like a natural fit for open source products. The relationships with customers and collaborators are invaluable.

When Chris “screenshot” Messina posted an image of Flickr’s Camera Finder and a link to Paul Kedrosky’s Flickr Blows up Market Research Biz my thoughts were confirmed. Paul gets it when he writes:

• “…people who are pursuing their own self-interest by participating in a giant market research project…”
• “It won’t be long before we see some software services companies make more money from ancillary data than from their app itself.”

Now, I don’t think Matt or any member of Automattic is thinking about making money in this way, but my point is how valuable this data is to Automattic, our partners and, of course, what causes a company to pause before publishing, our competitors.

Matt writes “far too many companies and services speak of their numbers in vague terms and toss around stats with no real meaning”. This could be revolutionary for collaboration and the whole software and services ecosystem.

Matt ends the stat pages by asking “think we should be tracking something else, or curious about more stats? Let us know in our blog.”

Update: Toni points out that LiveJournal publishes some stats. There is some interesting information there. As I mentioned to Matt, I’m interested to know what browsers, news readers, and email hosts people are using.