Slashdot Mirror
Web Logs Finally Meet Sim City
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."
If a picture says a thousand words, a city of pictures will help inform sysadmins/webmasters rapidly of infinite variables, by adding the 3d location of all data, relative to the position of information on the server. I wonder if this could be used somehow to stop spam, by "jailing" naughty virtual-citizens? Please, nobody quote Jurassic Park about this... oh hell, Lex: "It's a UNIX system! I know this!"
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It's all fun and games until a SimTornado comes and wipes out your city.
It's an intuitive design that uses visuals to display what even the best log-analysis tool could never display.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
They could do that. Just put a big slashdot logo inside the tornado.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Would it appear as a swarm of locust?
But Can I pick up visitors and toss them in the water just like roller coaster tycoon? That game is awsome, I certainly hope they make another with full 3D environments.
If this guy's product takes off and the price is right, it may give WebTrends a run for its money (literally).
Visitorville's sure in for some real skyrises and bright lights today...here we come :)
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Is if this is just useless, or if it's expensive, as well.
Would it be possible for websites to declare a "theme" on their city? For example, could a site like eBaums be creating something more like RollerCoaster Tycoon, and a site like slashdot could be creating a geeky paradise of open wifi and hi-tech gadgets? It might be an interesting twist to this idea which already seems like a very cool thing.
He say 1 and 1 and 1 is 3, got to be good lookin' cause hes so hard to see...
Get those damn kids off of about.html's grass!! Get outta here, you whippersnappers! Why, when I was your age, we more'd through NSCA logs by hand and we liked it!
A fre trial would have been really great. It looks like a good tool, but I would need to see how usefull I found it before I lay down my cash. Even if you cancel in the first month there is a %10 processing fee
paul reinheimer
How hard would it be to use the same exact system for mail servers? Sim City mail servers or something like it for tracking usage stats, could reduce a lot of time for sysadmins, and aid in the fight against spam. Maybe I'm reaching... but it didn't seem that far away when I wrote the first comment on the subject.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
So, would they have say a building going up in flames if your per day hit count dropped a lot.
Evolution or ID?
VisitorVile is telling me my web site has turned into a getto. Time to install the police station apache mod and upload more parks.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Obviously a single page that gets overloaded should be represented by the Riot or Fire events.
Slashdotting would be, what... the Tornado? Maybe the giant Godzilla! Rawr!
That green slime had it coming.
I'm starting out as a system administrator and I'm playing a lot of quake lately. Maybe I'll come up with something after a couple of years. Guys, watch out!!!
i dont really have a very good website, but if i could get this tool, i may actually have to "invest" in my own domain
I like this idea. This could be a great replacement for the feeling you get when a physical customer walks into your store.
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?
this seems similar to a VRML presentation layer. There should be graphics for the various exit actions the visitors take. If exit is by a 'back' reference button, user leaves by same bus. If by the 'back' arrow or address change, visitor jumps off building before the building resizes/relights.
Wow.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Over the years I've often thought it would be nice to create design or debugging tools that depicted programs as 3D pictures of machines, with widgets stuck on them performing logic functions and data flowing in and out through pipes and valves. But I've never done anything about it. A city is like a big machine, and streams of people flowing through the streets seem like a perfect way to represent web traffic.
Maybe the next step will be a website designer similar to the x-Tycoon games, that lets you plunk down buildings (pages) and throttle traffic with road sizes, stoplights or some other visual metaphor. I call this thing Cool!
When people ask you what genius is, show them the world before this, then show them this. Tools like this are the future of computer science,IMHO. I hope to be the artist that draws the little people/artwork/etc. for everyone's "software", rather than hand-writing programs forever.
stuff |
All these types of games are highly addictive. People waste insane amounts of time playing them. I can imagine hiring a few of these "addicts", showing them some basic web promotion techniques (and more importantly, how to teach themselves more) and set them loose with it. I'd have no problems paying someone to play this game, especially if they could build a huge city. If it were customiseable, the first thing I would do would be to turn the order confirmation page into a shopping mall. Turn that puppy into the Mall of America :-)
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Here's a direct link to the screenshots.
It can even trace traffic flows. Neat stuff.
will appear like the thief in GTA and he would go around robbing your vistors of there information and crashing there buildings...
i wonder if someone scanning for the newest webdav worm of the week shows up as a little bank robber running around the town, checking every door....
Didn't they have the spin-off game "The Streets of Sim-City" or something, which I seem to recall from the box was like Death Track, but you used the city map from SimCity...
Anyone ever play this?
"I know, not only have they plugged all the streets, but they're filling every coffee shop. I tried to get a biscotti this morning and I couldn't even get to the counter! They were just pushing and shoving to get to the counter, and then they'd just read the menu and leave. Bastards who did order just got a cup of coffee, then dumped it on the floor. Bastards."
"Yeah, the Mayor ought to do something, maybe put up signs for Slashdot tourists that send them to TubGirl town, or Goatseville. One sight of those neighborhoods would get their asses out of here..."
"Who lives there, anyway?"
"Trust me, you don't want to know..."
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
Ok, so who's going to use perl/php with Ming modules to do this? (or something better of course).
If this were actually a useful tool, I would never know.
I am not going to give out a credit card number just to try it out.
Too bad, they might have gotten my business.
Installing the product involves tagging each of your pages with some specific code so you can monitor whats going on, this leaves a couple questions:
Where is the data being generated stored?
Is the creator's website storing it all for me?
How secure is their site?
Most importantly (for those who care about their code)
If I choose to uninstall the product, will it rip all of its code off of my pages?
paul reinheimer
I can just see it... there would be a spotlight that comes out of the sky, and then the zombie users would descend, burning everything in their path and reducing the building to rubble. Then little clean-up crews and such afterwards.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Until they give it a name on par w/ "spinning cube of potential DOOM", it's not gonna cut the mustard.
Speaking of which, ever since I read that article, it's been pretty much downhill for everyone else's project names too. Hm.
[o]_O
What about Google traffic that's just google spider index tool? Does it show spiders crawling around your city?
How about other robots, such as spam harvesting tools? Do we get to see little cans of spam running around?
And with all these robots on the site, will a Blade Running scenario emerge?
I suppose the Slashdotting they're experiencing now (screenshots already fail to load) is represented in their software as a nuclear reactor meltdown destroying the city...
So now Slashdot is using other news sites to Slashdot people's servers. How often do we get a chance to use a new site that can hold up to our bombardment only to follow their link and bring that server to a crawl?
It's cute but is it useful? Has anyone tried it? I suspect that it doesn't really yield any insight, once you've got past the "Wow" factor. But I'd be interested to hear if anyone has found out anything using it.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
and the VisitorVille.com analyzer reports:
"SimCopter 1 reporting heavy traffic!"
--- Das einzige, das wir zu fürchten haben, ist die Furcht selbst.
Add to that the ability to communicate with the user, maybe by opening a chat session and you have the complete virtual store experience. You could have a virtual clerk that they could meet and talk with.
See this article from yesterday for some tech that basically handles that part.
Warning to patentaholics, this post is prior art!
This sort of graphic environment kind of reminds me of Stephenson's "Metaverse" in Snow Crash.
bah.
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.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
I never played that one, but there was also a sim-copter where you flew around putting out fires and saving injured people. It was the same deal, it used maps from SimCity, and let you fly through them in 3d. It was a pretty cool idea.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
But wait! There's more! It's a desert topping AND a floor wax, too!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Very cutesy, but the 3-d data layout could be useful.
I've been playing with MRTG 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....
anyone know of any open-source alternatives to advanced traffic logging systems like this? i've been using webalizer for years but there's gotta be something better by now.
Does one of the avatars appear with a drill if he is trying an exploit on the web server?
Where is my mind?
I hope they included street brawls between Linux and Windows users!
If http://www.VisitorVille.com/ were a building right now there'd be a big wrecking ball swinging in it's direction with '/.' written on it.
- Kevin
Please note: We are currently experiencing an extremely heavy server load due to the Wired article. Some images may not load. Thank you for your patience.
I'd just like to point out that they've misspelled Wired.
A much better metaphor for the /. effect.
/. buses are just plowing through the people in town, leaving bloody corpses strewn in their wake. As the looting continues, people start making off with the foundations of the buildings and, one by one, they start simply collapsing and filling the area with rubble and dust.
Thousands and thousands of buses with "/." on top pour into the town. They all dump 50-60 passengers each and the streets suddenly become full. It's so packed that there's rioting in the streets and fighting. Everyone pours out of the buildings to join in the looting, and every building in town goes dark as people make for the exits. The streets are so packed that the
After you yank the network cable, the dust slowly clears and all you find is countless corpses, destroyed buildings, and smashed busloads of people from where the buildings fell on them.
If that isn't the perfect metaphor, what is?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This way of picturing things really reminds me of the book Neuromancer by William Gibson where net users interacted with networks, systems, and data using a 3d visual representation. Of course, this is far cry from hardware implants completely taking over a persons senses.
What I'd like to know is, does it have a skin or something more appropriate for my porn site? You know, cabs and cars circling the blocks for hookers, scam artists pick-pocketing my visitors...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
This story makes it immediately apparent what a ridiculous bunch of blowhards Slashdotters are. This program is a pile of crap, I've used it.
Have any of you used it? It's a silly cumbersome little program. This should be obvious to all the piercing intellects we have here. Hmm....
Please note: We are currently experiencing an extremely heavy server load due to the Wired article. Some images may not load. Thank you for your patience.
/.'d
-From the visitorville website
Wired article my ass... its because the article got
Where's the love?
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
I think it would strengthen the metaphor a bit if the AOL bus was a short bus instead of the full-length one they're using now.
While this is very cool and would be fun to watch and all... could someone explain to me what insane person would pay that much per month to do this? The lowest price per month is almost my ANNUAL price for hosting + domain. Come on... how many people want to pay that? And with no free trial!
I've been using VisitorVille for a few months.
First, it's fairly cheap compared to some other ASP web analytics solutions.
Second, it's got some useful stats and things that aren't part of the Sim-City like interface.
Third, the interface is fun at times, but it wears off after a while. You just see a lot of people walking around, and although you can follow visitors and get a visual view of your site's page popularity by looking at building size, it's more "fun" than useful.
When I want to really analyze my site stats for useful data, I find myself using a different stats solution I have setup. VisitorVille is more for when I want to just have a few minutes of fun watching people walk around my site.
Damn, that was one fun game, I bought a whole Maxis Pack thing with that, sim copter and others... "Crap, that crazed /. reader just mowed down half of our corporate users!"
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
Yes, I bought the 2000 Platinum edition from the bargain bin just becaue it came with Streets, and Copter (never played copter).
I was very disappointed. I had grand visions of getting caught in traffic jams if I had bad traffic, seeing the grand facades of my large buildings, etc. I guess I just had too grand of visions. I know I expected entirely too much, but still I felt let down.
The street map was correct. All the buildings looked alike. There were very few models for the buildings, and the models that were there were pretty boring. The streets only had traffice pertaining to the 'Streets of SimCity" game, nothing to do with SimCity's traffic problems.
It might be cool to have a client server type setup someday. Have the game engine running, and then as Mayor, jump in a copter, and fly over it a bit closer than the management interface, or get in a car, and see if the traffic problems are as insufferable as they say. Maybe even invite other "Mayors" from outside, to tour your city.
I can always imagine a lot more than I could ever deliver as a programmer. But I guess that is where most innovation comes from.
This must be for blog communities. Not the majority of websites. I can't see any admin asking the CIO "can we have some additional funding to buy a statistical analyzer that looks like sim city".
Must be for bloggers.
Lets see if in this economy (with these gas prices in particular people will part with that much cash.
This seems to be similar what the people who originally created the tripwire security monitor program had in mind.
I haven't look at it in years, but back in the day they used to say that they wanted a program that would show your network as a series of rooms in a building. Intrusions would show up on the display just as a physical intrusion would be indicated on the monitor of an alarm system.
Their idea was that the same flunky that watched the security desk could watch the monitor for intrusions since it would be 'virtually' the same display.
Nice to finally see someone make an attempt a the paradigm, since I don't think the Tripwire people ever did.
The windows only platform restriction and the tiered subscription pricing scream "amateur hour" to me.
I won't be interested until it can run on a more reasonable platform and can be had for a flat fee. I'm happy to pay for upgrades, but I'm not going to pay by the month.
ps: I'm writing this from a windows box, so I don't care if you think windows is a reasonable platform for this. I don't. But thanks for the thought.
-----
Pretty Bad Privacy (PBP) Public Key
6
This reminds me of that Doom front-end to "top" that somebody cooked up a while back. Lemme see.... ah, right here: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/10/20/1110242.shtm l
I was going to check it out. Then I stopped.
First of all, the lowest package is $30/month, that's very expensive for a personal site. Second, like you said, even if you cancel, they keep 10% of the fee you paid.
I see it more as a toy than anything else. For any more serious stats, you would use a log analyzer. A $30/month toy is out of my reach.
...VisitorWorld! I really like what they've done here.
Now, wouldn't it be great if you could have a central server recieving the logs from all of the separate VisitorVille-using sites... mix in a little geographic data... and you could have a map of the world showing Internet city density by location.
Then you could do other cool things like show streets, roads and highways to indicate routes between nodes.
You could show air traffic for wireless connections, etc. The mind boggles.
Once slashdotted, the visitorville logs will be quite familiar to all of us!
n ceday.jpg
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~zhang/movies/big/independe
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
"This is the coolest thing, I have ever seen"
Maybe if your site fails to properly load for a browser, the visitor should burst into flames with associated noises. That way website owners would not remain oblivious to broken websites. It would be uncomfortable explaining to the boss why avatars are screaming and dying whenever they enter your site.
I propose an unwashed heathen for IE users, a cool looking guy for the various incarnations of Netscape/Moz with associated logos on the shirts, a blind person with a cane for lynx users and a mad scientist for Opera. As alternatives, you could use a person in a wheelchair or stait jacket for IE and, hey, an opera singer for Opera. I want Bender for web spiders, its not negotiable:)
If you include mail servers in there, you could use mail trucks to deliver the mail, with the brown UPS trucks delivering from non-spam sites and the USPS trucks delivering from sites that are known spam havens. I know Im more excited to see the UPS truck than the USPS truck. Nobody sends junkmail through UPS.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
Can I type in "FUND" to receive VC money? Can't type it more than 5 times or my server will crash from an earthquake tho... :\
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
Until you buldoze your home page :)
Still, you have to give the guy credit for creating such an interisting hybrid.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
You should be able to doubleclick on a person and pop up a questionaire or chat box on their screen.
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
Reminds me of Melissa Scott's Dreamships, where spaceships are piloted through customizable alternative user interfaces that reflect the personality of the pilot -- e.g. one woman chose hot-air ballooning.
Well.. All I really need is the option to install a bat phone in the mayor's office. He's got the answer to everything.
Maybe he's even got a tornado reversal spray?
I wonder what a slashdotting would look like on a site using this for traffic analysis.
It would be the equivalent of a natural disaster, like in sim city! I wonder if they would have an army feature like they did in sim city.
I can't believe somebody actually did this. I had this same idea 5+ years ago, but I never worked on it. (I can produce my old web page for those who doubt me) I look forward to seeing it work and see if my old idea actually could be useful.
Don't get me wrong, I have no bitterness, I'm just pleased to see somebody do it.
--
Cool idea, but let's hand out some credit:
The statician Hermann Chernoff was first to developed the idea of using faces to display multi-variable data.
Actually, if someone just wants a simple metaphor, faces probably are the best choice, given that our brains are hard-wired to do face recognition especially well.
"The more visitors on a site, the taller the buildings, and the brighter the lights on each floor." - Wired
So what does the building that represents their site look like now as it's being /.ed?
Yes they did. They also had SimCopter in which you could load your maps from SimCity and fly around in a 'copter.
SimCopter came first. I thought it was decent. Gameplay got boring after a while. Then they rolled out Streets, which as far as I could tell, was Copter with a few changes to the code. The gameplay sucked ass. There was zero traffic and poor graphics.
It was actually rather disappointing.
This would be great for an ant theme. See how much traffic with ant trails. The heavy sources and destinations are where the heavy traffics are. Or it could be an Ant Farm where activities take place.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Wow that looks good. I'd really enjoy watching my virtual traffic flow (well, maybe for about a half hour), but I'd rather not pay for this. I guess it tracks using javascript or hidden images or something, sending the data on referals etc. to a central server (like SiteMeter), then I guess that server sends UDP packets to the client to direct vehicles and people in the virtual world. It would actually be quite simple to do this kind of thing on ones own (well, at least to create the server, the client would need some more work). It's such a shame the prices are quite insane (I mean, an unplayable SC3000 for ~$40/month dependent on # visitors, no thank you). Hope to see a free alternative soon, I might even work on it :)
Absolutely great idea, though. More of this innovation would be appreciated.
I have to agree, that is the best metaphor for the /. affect.
I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me...
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Back in Oct '99 "http://slashdot.org/articles/99/10/20/1110242.sht ml"
Its a sourceforge project: psDooM
I used to work for Webtrends doing technical support (yecch!) so I feel like I have some good insight into web analysis and it's pitfalls and benefits, as well as the types of people who use it. The biggest problems by far that were encountered was setup-configuration and graph interpretation. I think that both of these problems will be increased in a program like this, and that the cool factor provided by the model will not offset these problems for most serious webmasters.
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.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
I was thinking more along the lines of 10,000 Canyoneros.
The pricing scheme is open to rampant abuse.
/. crowd and your daily unique visitor count will get WAY screwed up.
All a $29.95/month mom&pop store needs is to get hit with a
I wonder what happens when you reach your limit -- does it just stop keeping track or will you be bumped to a higher tier. You maybe go home on a Friday and come-in on monday and see 200,000 unique visitors over the weekend...yuck!
Too bad there's not a "free" level for non-commercial, personal use.
-l
I could easily see how a few real world metaphors can be used in a sort of 'stretchy' fashion, the way the buildings get bigger and smaller in this thing based on how many people are 'in' it. I wonder how it handles the fact that people change locations pretty much instantly.
Of course the next step is full on Grand Theft Router with little armed PacketPeople who can actually fight for bandwidth! Yeah! Or maybe capture the flag, but the flag is actually a P2P connection. And moderators would be huge silent golems striding through the city, rearranging things as they see fit, stepping on some but lifting up others, and never telling us why... and of course the Ancient Editor Gods, resplendent in their ivory towers floating above, casting down both wisdom and duplicate stories in equal measure. Ah, what a sight it would be.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Shouldn't those be Canyoneros with /. on top? Not only would they drop off passengers, they'd get involved in nocking down the buildings and running over the corpses and other vehicles as well.
looks like this is the code from their own page:
p hp?ProfileID=148"></script>= 148">p ?ProfileID=148" border=0 alt="VisitorVille.com">
<!-- 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.
You don't get out much, do you?
So some weiner beats you to the punch, exploiting a weakness in the server before it can be patched.
Next thing you know there's a little guy in a black leather jacket running people down, shooting up the neighborhood, and bitch-slapping the prostitutes.
It's Grand Theft Auto: Visitorville, coming to a desktop near you.
In case of Slashdotting, the wailing of the server will be represented by a medley of Morrisey tunes.
They could always give you the option of buying a Windows plant, with the understanding that in x months/weeks/days, it was bound to explode due to a lack of maintenance and release tons of Blaster/Sasser/Torgo/Cowboyneal/DRM/MS Bob radiation into your surrounding markup, script and proprietary software extension zones.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
How many geeks are out there anyway? I think there should be an offical geek-census software to keep track all these kindred spirits.
On the screenshots from the site, there's a cute sim-city style interface, overlaid with charts and graphs.
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?
Write up a purchase order for me please. We need a logitech cordless gamepad. Make it a priority one. It is an issue with the production webserver. Got to go, we're having a meeting about it in the gameroo... i mean boardroom.
Yes, contribute more to the dumbing down of the net!
I admit this application is very creative and interesting. However, as much as I find it amusing to look at, it also seems to be a great example of unproductive, wasted, metaphors further encouraging the ADHD'ification of the populace.
Do we really need web site traffic represented as little people wandering around?
This to me seems ultimately as useful as Microsoft's stupid talking paperclip. Yea, it's amusing for the first few days, then it becomes an inefficient, time-wasting distraction. In other words, corporate America will probably love it.
Forget the webserver, the graphics card will choke before the NIC even begins to smolder...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
This is the coolest thing I've seen all day. I especially like the line about how my mother inlaw could look at this and understand what was going on. To some, this looks silly, but this may be the future of intuitive interfaces for nonintuitive situations. We humans live in a world of 3 physical dimensions (at least that we are generally aware of...) filled with objects of varying familiarity that we learn to interact with. If our computing interfaces become more similar to what we have evolved to understand intuitively, then we can take increasingly complex data sets and tap our full potential for analysis.
Oh well, at the very least it will be even more fun to be a nerd!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
This has to be one of the best ideas I've seen in a while .. now management can really understand what happens on our web site. No more snoring during the monthly report :)
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.
Just as a PowerPoint presentation doesn't really increase our ability to grok the quarterly sales figures, the visual fluff of metaphorical buildings and busses doesn't help us understand traffic data. Simple bar graphs do not introduce the distortion of perspective. They're not sexy, but they do not make it more difficult to discern relationships between data elements, the way a 3d urban representation does.
I'm also reminded of good old Microsoft Bob, and some of the more antiquated websites from the 1990s that forced a metaphor onto something that didn't need one in the first place. Back in those days, Web designers felt that people wanted an "experience" when what they really wanted was an attractive and clean interface to information, organized in a way that would be useful.
Professional web developers and marketers (I know, they're all stupid, they all want dumbed-down visual information, blah blah blah) need information they can drill down into quickly and easily without a lot of superflous distraction. There are already several good tools, like Summary and FunnelWeb, on the market. I don't think this experiment will make it in an already saturated market.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
So when your site gets slashdotted, how does it show up? A giant lizard attacking your city?
There's no place like
Judging by the screen shots, the primary way of representing site activity is skyscrapers in a rectangular city grid.
The city-grid metaphor fails to capture the essential hierarchical structure of a Web site
In addition, showing page popularity by the height of buildings favours pages that are designed primarily to route users to other pages. For instance, the home page would typically get the most hits.
However, the objective of a home page is to route users to pages that provide some information specific to their interest. These pages are inherently less popular but what the site manager needs to know is whether people who go to the home page are ultimately getting to the less popular pages that interest them further down the hierarchy.
In effect, it's the traffic between pages that's more interesting than the hits on the page. The service does provide this information but in a more conventional form of percentages and lists.
A pinball machine metaphore might be more useful with visitors represented by the pinball. The pinball should get through the maze of bumpers with as few rebounds as possible before exiting the game. If users spend a lot of time bouncing around, the site is failing to get them to the pages that interest them quickly.
I think you mean
Où se trouve le W.C.?
reverendG raises some good points, and I had a thought: what if a building represented the base page of dynamic content (the longest common url substring of the request) and variations represeted rooms within that building? Or add-ons to the building. That way you could even monitor the frequency of requests for permutations of that dynamic content.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Oh my god, unlike a normal license, they a single user use it on more than one machine! What fuckwits!
Only if you use Mozilla.
Newsflash!
Heavy high speed traffic caused a catastrophic accident just moments ago, as a bus full of Linux OS users collided with a UNIX-based webcrawling engine.
Reports have been sketchy, but we have just recieved confirmation from VisitorVille PD... no survivers... It has been confirmed... *NIX is dead.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
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> 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.