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."
It's all fun and games until a SimTornado comes and wipes out your city.
They could do that. Just put a big slashdot logo inside the tornado.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Nice try, but since it's web only it's not going to handle email :-(.
:-(.
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
Would it appear as a swarm of locust?
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
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.
Pick them up and toss one by one? You're so inefficent! See what you do is delete the path leading out the park. Wait a while, thousands of people stand by the gates not being able to get out... then you lower the land under the remaining path until it's water. Then delete the path as the people still stand on it :D
SecondPageMedia - Wha
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?
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
"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).
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
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.
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.
Very good idea, with a stupid convoluted license.
Things like this from their pricing page.
If you want to use VisitorVille for Windows on up to three personal computers -- office, laptop, home -- then the optional Power User plan is for you. Note that this is not a multi-user option, but rather a way for you to exercise your single-user license on more than one personal computer
Its licenses like this that made me stop upgrading Webtrends as well. (The 'we can audit you at any time' in the webtrends 3.5 license did it for me)
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.
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