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."

Comments

SimDisaster

[zenetik]

It's all fun and games until a SimTornado comes and wipes out your city.

Re:Picture

[daviddennis]

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

Slashdot Effect?

[protolith]

Would it appear as a swarm of locust?

the city that never sleeps

[GillBates0]

A company's entire Web presence is seen as an urban or suburban neighborhood, with each individual Web page presented as a building. The more visitors on a site, the taller the buildings, and the brighter the lights on each floor.

Visitorville's sure in for some real skyrises and bright lights today...here we come :)

Damn Kids!

[Dorf on Perl]

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!

My favorite new running metaphor!

[teamhasnoi]

"That's the 15th 'Slashdot' bus I've seen this morning! Is there a Fat Virgin Convention in town? I have to get my ass to work!"

"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..."

Re:Slashdot

[mackman]

Actually, in the Wired screenshots you see people arrive from askjeves.com in a bus with the askjeves.comlogo on the top. I would immagine /. would look more like that scene in Troy of the 10,000 boats arriving full of angry soldiers.

Don't think it will ever break into big companies

[reverendG]

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.