News of the early-stage alpha test surfaced late last week on blogs of two of the project team members--Ian Thomas, who heads the Gatineau project for Microsoft's Digital Advertising Solutions team, and Reeves Little, program manager with Windows Live Europe.

Thomas wrote that the technology is based on that of the Gatineau, Canada-based DeepMetrix Corporation, which Microsoft acquired last year. In the coming months, Microsoft expects to launch an invitation-only beta to test the tool, Thomas wrote.

The product is slated for release later this year, but Microsoft intends to gradually add users to avoid the system instability that initially plagued Google Analytics, Thomas wrote. "We hope to release this product during 2007; however, we're extremely keen to avoid a repeat of Google's experience with Google Analytics, so we will be ramping up our user numbers gradually to make sure everyone has a good experience from a performance perspective," he wrote.

Shortly after it launched in October 2005, a surge in demand overwhelmed Google Analytics, leading the company to briefly stop accepting new users.

David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning for 360i, said the planned offering seems needed. "There's a lot of room for thought leadership, and a lot of room to basically reach out and provide transparency for advertisers and agencies," he said. "When the traffic comes in and as they provide better ways to target their users, then they can provide more value than just the raw numbers."

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