Following last week’s article on Nielsen/NetRatings and their outrageous claims regarding Google’s marketshare in the Office 2.0 space, I have had discussions with several service providers, and we came up with the conclusion that a better auditing service is needed. Here is what we have in mind.

The problem with Nielsen/NetRatings, and many other market research firms, is that they work with panels, and panels tend to exhibit skewed results, especially when they are small and deal with a multitude of channels. If you have a relatively large panel of users, and the number of TV channels they can watch is in the tens or hundreds, you could get fairly decent results. But if you have a relatively small panel of users, and the number of websites they have access to is in the tens or hundreds of millions, your results will be poor at best.

This is a difficult problem to solve, and there is no perfect solution for it. Competitors like Alexa managed to establish larger panels, but the results they provide do not take into account the traffic generated by websites that require secure HTTPS connections. For Office 2.0, quite frankly, this is a show stopper.

There is not a single solution that would solve the problem entirely, but a combination of approaches might get pretty close, which is why our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup now uses a combination of Alexa Ranking, Google PageRank, and user data to establish a ranking of the top players in any given family of application. Our goal today is to provide access to user data, by working with as many Office 2.0 companies as we can.

The idea is pretty simple: every month, we will ask participating companies to share with us as much user data as they are willing to, and at the minimum the total number of registered users, the number of individual visits in the past month, and the number of individual users who logged in at least once in the past month. In order to make sure that we get honest answers, we will ask for screenshots of the traffic monitoring tools that are used internally by the vendors, and will allow ourselves to get direct access to these systems from time to time. Results will be published on the IT|Redux website every month, and will be integrated into the Office 2.0 Database.

So far, EditGrid, ThinkFree, and Zoho have agreed to participate. If you would like your company to join this group, for any Office 2.0 application (not just spreadsheets or word processors), feel free to drop me an email, and I will tell you more about our program. Last but not least, it’s entirely free for vendors, and the only people we might charge down the road are end users who would like access to more data. That way, we maximize our chances of preserving our independence.