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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."
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 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.
If this guy's product takes off and the price is right, it may give WebTrends a run for its money (literally).
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.
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?
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
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).
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
At $30/mo for low-traffic sites, I think the price is way too high. IMO, it would be more reasonable to charge $5/mo for low traffic, and maybe $30/mo for a high traffic site. Neat idea, though.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.