Web Logs Finally Meet Sim City 218
l0rd writes "A good piece on wired says :
A few games of Roller Coaster Tycoon don't usually translate into productive work, but for one developer the diversion planted the seed for making website analysis more intuitive.
Several years after playing those inspirational games, Robert Savage came up with VisitorVille, a website-traffic analysis package that essentially crosses the DNA of SimCity with that of the traditional chart- and graph-centric tools businesses have long been using.
Screenshots included."
Picture (Score:3, Interesting)
I like it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Picture (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like it works by putting a tracking image on your web site that resides on their servers and then using that to track remotely. Clever since it means you don't have to install any software on the web site or have control over your web server. On the other hand it would be a bit of a pain to edit all those pages. I'll have to dig deeper to see if it works with web sites that are all dynamic.
I have to say that I like the idea enough that I may well exhume my Windows machine to give it a go. Pity there's no Mac or Linux version
D
Price? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Picture (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Best Replacement for Brick and Mortar Customers (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it feasible to just run VisitorVille on a PC or a big screen in your virtual store's office/room? I would enjoy watching a visitor walk around my city, go through various buildings all while I'm writing up product descriptions and working on site design. This could really give you a sense of how your business is growing, as well.
Has anyone actually used this product, yet?
Call me crazy, but I think it's great (Score:4, Interesting)
Not just for web would be very cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Or on the corporte lan where user Joe has a 'house' and all of a sudden cars and people are jamming around it (he just emailed a link to his beta web project stored on his local PC).
And the BOFH could stomp through as King Kong and wreak havoc on Jane's mail-merge (since she attached a 5MB file instead of linking to it).
If not already posted, check this summary here: visual summary [visitorville.com]
Ok, so who's going to use perl/php with Ming modules to do this? (or something better of course).
Excellent Idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't want to be a naysayer, but I'd be a little careful about how an application like this will convince a user of the metaphor so well that they may start to come up with invalid conclusions. That's not altogether bad, it could help a designer think outside the box, but imagine your PHB deciding that your web-site is too crowded.
Re:What I'd like to know... (Score:3, Interesting)
MRTG and SNMP as free alternative? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been playing with MRTG [ee.ethz.ch] a little lately...I wonder if you could have Apache or other processes provide info via SNMP and use or modify MRTG to provide more 3-d and 4-d (brightness like VisitorVille's lit/unlit buildings or color) 'graphs'?
It's probably a strech, but maybe....
New features needed... (Score:4, Interesting)
Should be able to right click and have a context menu with kick-ban, transport to another page on next user action, etc
Should be able to transport users to a jail cell in the city using OnBeforeUnload...
Of course, this requires more integration with the website, but the reality is that the website is there to amuse you, not the little ants running around from page to page.
-Adam
Dreamships (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not just for web would be very cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't think it will ever break into big companies (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a couple of problems with setup and configuration, but the biggest without doubt is "can it handle dynamic pages?" Is it able to discern the difference by pages when that difference is controlled by a URI query? What if the dynamic parameters are passed in with a POST? Will this require the tracking on each page to be modified? Many large companies use dynamic websites, so this could be a serious barrier.
As far as interpretation problems go, I think it's pretty cool that this software is able to give graphic metaphors for traffic on a web site, but it's hard to use abstract metaphors when doing business or web traffic analysis.
I think that this is going to be a tool, almost exclusively, of small websites that are able to tweak their web pages on a whim (unlike large companies are able to do, in most cases), which makes the price point even more of a problem. Thirty bucks a month?! That's a lot of money for someone who's running a small site, it could be more than their hosting fees.
It's a cool idea, and I like to see the virtual world evolving, but I don't think that this is going to do well.
code (Score:1, Interesting)
<!-- BEGIN VisitorVille code v1.0 -->
<script>t_rid="148";</script>
<script src="http://www.visitorville.com/js/plgtrafic.js.
<noscript>
<a href="http://www.visitorville.com/top/?profile_id
<img src="http://www.visitorville.com/counter/count.ph
</a>
</noscript>
<!-- END VisitorVille code v1.0 -->
Seems like you could probably do something interesting by messing with the id number.
Cute, but not necessarily a good mapping. (Score:3, Interesting)
While the sim-city display is cute, it doesn't look particularly useful nor relevent. Why? The 2d-grid layout of a city does not match the N-d layout of most websites.
The charts and graphs look useful, but how do they differ from any other traffic analysis package?
Edward Tufte == aesthetics > usability. (Score:2, Interesting)
> As Edward Tufte points out in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations, the meaningful display of information is about removing visual clutter, not introducing it.
Since when is Edward Tufte an authority on usability?
I saw a train schedule in _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_. To me, it was a confusing jumble of branches. I guess his point was that it was "beautiful".
I came to understand it after an hour. (I was on an Amtrak train with a superior text schedule!) My best guess was that the designers ran out of space and added branches to extend the timeline. I was confused because they looked like separate train lines.