Marcelo Calbucci

    One of the biggest problems of consolidating reports from multiple sources in synchronizing the timestamps. When you talk about a Web-based business that is quite relevant.

    If each report is on a different timezone, it will be pretty hard to define what is "Saturday", or "Tuesday", or 5 other terms.

    Very early on Sampa, I decided that everything that we log or store would be in Universal Time Coordinates (UTC), sometimes also known as GMT*. We knew that our users would be world-wide, and we didn't want to have to deal with timezone and daylight saving time when dealing with logs and reports.


    Now, not everything that we do at Sampa is managed by us. Like many other web businesses we use Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliates, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, etc. All Google Services (and Amazon as well) use GMT-8 (Pacific Standard Time) and that is a pain.

    We can't really aligned what Google tell us about clicks, impressions and revenue with our other data.

    Now, don't get me wrong, Sampa is too small of a company to cause Google to change is timestamp to UTC, however, I'm sure that are hundreds of thousands of companies world-wide that would very much appreciate that change. Just go to the Google Groups talking about Adsense, Adwords and Analytics to how many people are asking to be able to change timezones.