TechCrunch's Super Secret Spy Subdomain

Earlier today, TechCrunch Co-editor, Erick Schonfeld made a blog post about his issues with Firefox 3.5.  However, in that blog post, he posted a screenshot (see below) which included a tab labeled “TechCrunch Spy”.  Purposely or not, it stirred some discussion in the comments.  Thinking it would be too obvious (I tried it anyway), and I typed spy.techcrunch.com into my address bar, and sure enough, a password protected web page appeared.  So what is this TechCrunch Spy?

I have a couple of guesses (both speculative – right after the jump)

1. It’s some kind of web analytic system which lets them monitor their visitors (e.g. what page they’re reading, how long they’re on the site, etc).

2. It’s a variation of this particular app (called Spy) hosted on Google’s AppSpot.  The app essentially allows you to monitor and keep track of what’s being talked about on the web in various places such as Twitter, Friendfeed, Yahoo News, Google Reader, and a couple of other places.  I would assume something like that would be vital for TechCrunch to keep up with the latest happenings around the web.

I’m sure many people would be interested to find out for sure.  Perhaps it will take a CrunchGate for it to come out?  Only time will tell.