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.
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.
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 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
Here's a direct link to the screenshots.
It can even trace traffic flows. Neat stuff.
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....
"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).
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
and the VisitorVille.com analyzer reports:
"SimCopter 1 reporting heavy traffic!"
--- Das einzige, das wir zu fürchten haben, ist die Furcht selbst.
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
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....
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.
Time to file that patent application, eh?
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 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.
Depends what you're looking for, really. AWStats is pretty good and goes further than Webalizer in terms of visits and visitors (see comparison with Webalizer), while tools like aWebVisit can give you a better idea of the traffic flow.
But the notion of visit and visitor is always subject to discussion - what you see (in your server logfiles) is not always what you get (people viewing your content through proxy caches etc.)
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
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
meh, if i want to be acosted by sales clerks trying to make me buy something, i'll GO to a B&M store. my online shopping experience is so great because i don't have to talk to anyone, just add to cart, pay and go.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
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.
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 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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.