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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."
Here's a direct link to the screenshots.
It can even trace traffic flows. Neat stuff.
He does a real nice job describing his experience with it in an article titled "A Postcard from VisitorVille" which includes some nifty pictures - highly recommended viewing.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
So you CAN greet them, just you probably can't add a shopping cart plug-in yet
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.
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.
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.
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'?
You should look at a free product called Cacti. It uses RRDTool (from the maker of MRTG) to generate graphs of anything. Literally, anything you can script in Perl or Bash to return a variable when the script is run can be graphed. It's very powerful, and free too, which can't be beat.
No, I'm not the project developer, I just use it at work and find it quite a bit better than many commercial products that do the same thing.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
True enough and the service is flawed by that standard but what it is trying to do is a bit more ambitious. As this writer puts it, the service is trying to map an abstract operation to an intuitive environment.
The type of displays that Tufte talks about are often trying to do the reverse: map an intuitive environment to an abstract display. An example would be a flight control system which maps a two dimensional radar screen with labeled, blinking dots to aircraft in three dimensions.
The service's use of SimCity as the intuitive environment is plausible since SimCity is fairly successful in mapping abstract processes in its domain. The problem is that Web site activity doesn't map very well to urban activity.
The extraneous details or visual clutter in conventional graphs are often what give a metaphore its power. What the service may need is simply a better metaphore.