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Web Logs Finally Meet Sim City 218
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."
Picture (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Picture (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Picture (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Picture (Score:2)
-l
Re:Picture (Score:2)
Re:Picture (Score:2)
Just put it in one of those.
Personally I'd rather see an option to be able to license a server side version as I'd rather not use 3rd party tracking.
And I agree with you about the Windows only junk, but with VirtualPC or Win4Lin it's not a huge problem.
Re:Picture (Score:2)
It's certainly trivial to put it in the page template, but I don't see it as meaning much, unless I wanted to see busses taking off and driving from corder to corder.
D
Re:Picture (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't that make inbound links difficult? Not to mention search engine coverage.
If it works anything like all of the other 3rd party tracking tags I have implemented over the years you specify params in the request, so you pass one of the identifying post vars with the page name.
On anoth
Re:Picture (Score:2)
It could be graphically represented as a complex of several buildings, with its own private access roads.
Re:Picture (Score:2)
This looks like a great tool for us web admins. If this trend continues, I'll be able to play games all day and my boss will think I'm hard at work! "Ahh, monitoring the web site again, eh? You're such a dedicated employee, always working so hard. I'm putting you in for a promotion."
SimDisaster (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
And start blinking a "Run Siren" button... the only thing different from the game is, after you click the button, the people slow to a crawl instead of running for shelter.
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
You forgot a Simpsons reference (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah.. rioting. (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Otto... (Score:2, Insightful)
I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me...
Sean D.
Almost perfect (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:SimDisaster (Score:2)
I like it (Score:4, Interesting)
Floor Wax (Score:3, Funny)
But wait! There's more! It's a desert topping AND a floor wax, too!
Re:Floor Wax (Score:2)
Re:I like it (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Slashdot Effect? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdot Effect? (Score:2, Funny)
Just like RCT? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Just like RCT? (Score:3, Funny)
So would that be an IP denial?
Re:Just like RCT? (Score:2)
Re:Just like RCT? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just like RCT? (Score:3, Funny)
The people will LINE UP FOR HOURS WAITING TO DIE.
What's more, if you put the ride on land that's high enough, it will clip off the top of the game world and your people will be counted as lea
Re:Just like RCT? (Score:2)
Re:Just like RCT? (Score:2)
Price? (Score:2, Interesting)
the city that never sleeps (Score:5, Funny)
Visitorville [visitorville.com]'s sure in for some real skyrises and bright lights today...here we come :)
Re:the city that never sleeps (Score:2)
What I'd like to know... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What I'd like to know... (Score:3, Insightful)
Useless? Keep an open mind - this is a tool that can help smaller web sites and less experienced webmasters analyze their web traffic and make better decisions based off that information. True, these folk may not fit your ideals b/c they can't grep their own logs, but alas, even your underlings deserve consideration.
Re:What I'd like to know... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What I'd like to know... (Score:2)
Damn Kids! (Score:5, Funny)
Free Trial (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free Trial (Score:2)
Their bandwidth isn't doing so great with the Slashdot effect, so I'm not sure if they're even ready for all the customers this is going to bring them. (I'm probably going to give it a try myself).
D
I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Free Trial (Score:2)
Day 1. Install the product
Day 2-5. Play with it
Day 4-8. Look for problems, areas where users are having difficulty getting to the information they need, and places where users frequently abandon the site. Fix those problems.
Day 9-10. Monitor results, adjust as needed
Start over.
site content (Score:2)
demilitarized zone (Score:5, Funny)
SimDisasters! (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdotting would be, what... the Tornado? Maybe the giant Godzilla! Rawr!
Re:SimDisasters! (Score:2)
Best Replacement for Brick and Mortar Customers (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Best Replacement for Brick and Mortar Customers (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I don't see how this is anything but eye candy for people with websites. Maybe that's the point.... I don't always understand the point behind everything. For instance, those segway things....
Re:Best Replacement for Brick and Mortar Customers (Score:4, Informative)
So you CAN greet them, just you probably can't add a shopping cart plug-in yet
Re:Best Replacement for Brick and Mortar Customers (Score:2)
Say someone has a question about a product, and can't find the answer. You watch them wander around, then they chat with you. You tell them where to go (you can see they hadn't been there, because you can see their visit history, and you can see where they are at that moment). Kinda cool.
Re:May I help you? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow! Great Idea! (Score:2)
Maybe the next step will be a website designer similar to the x-Tycoon games, that lets you plunk
That is genius (Score:2)
Call me crazy, but I think it's great (Score:4, Interesting)
Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
It can even trace traffic flows [visitorville.com]. Neat stuff.
vulnerability scans? (Score:3, Funny)
My favorite new running metaphor! (Score:5, Funny)
"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..."
Not just for web would be very cool (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [visitorville.com]
Ok, so who's going to use perl/php with Ming modules to do this? (or something better of course).
Re:Not just for web would be very cool (Score:2)
Re:Not just for web would be very cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Uninstall? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Slashdot representation (Score:5, Funny)
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.
zerg (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking of which, ever since I read that article, it's been pretty much downhill for everyone else's project names too. Hm.
Robots and Spiders (Score:2)
How about other robots, such as spam harvesting tools? Do we get to see little cans of spam running around?
And with all these robots on the site, will a Blade Running scenario emerge?
Cute, but is it useful? (Score:2)
VisitorVille traffic as of today (Score:3, Funny)
"SimCopter 1 reporting heavy traffic!"
Excellent Idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
MRTG and SNMP as free alternative? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been playing with MRTG [ee.ethz.ch] 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....
Re:MRTG and SNMP as free alternative? (Score:3, Informative)
You should look at a free product called Cacti [raxnet.net]. 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
What I need... (Score:2)
Lies! (Score:2, Funny)
-From the visitorville website
Wired article my ass... its because the article got
Where's the love?
Justified cost (Score:2)
Must be for bloggers.
Lets see if in this economy (with these gas prices in particular people will part with that much cash.
Wouldnt browser type be more useful than TLD (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Thats all well and good... (Score:2)
Still, you have to give the guy credit for creating such an interisting hybrid.
New features needed... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Dreamships (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not a totally new idea (Score:3, Informative)
The statician Hermann Chernoff was first to developed the idea of using faces [wolfram.com] 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.
An Ant Theme! (Score:2)
Amazing (Score:2)
Don't think it will ever break into big companies (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Pricing scheme needs work (Score:2)
All a $29.95/month mom&pop store needs is to get hit with a
I wonder what happens when you reach your limit -- does it just stop keeping track or will you be bumped to a higher tier. You maybe go home on a Friday and come-in on monday and see 200,000 unique visitors over the weekend...yuck!
Too bad there's not a "free" level for non-commercial, personal use.
-l
We need more things like this. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
hax0red! (Score:2)
Next thing you know there's a little guy in a black leather jacket running people down, shooting up the neighborhood, and bitch-slapping the prostitutes.
It's Grand Theft Auto: Visitorville, coming to a desktop near you.
In case of Slashdotting, the wailing of the server will be represented by a medley of Morrisey tunes.
Cute, but not necessarily a good mapping. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
A heretical notion (Score:5, Insightful)
As Edward Tufte [edwardtufte.com] 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 [pmt.org], 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 [summary.net] and FunnelWeb [funnelwebcentral.com], on the market. I don't think this experiment will make it in an already saturated market.
Re:A heretical notion (Score:3, Informative)
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 [unm.edu] 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 dimensiona
Wrong metaphore, wrong emphasis (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [visitorville.com] 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.
Re:Good Job (Score:2)
Too late. [sourceforge.net]
Re:Slashdotting represented by reactor meltdown (Score:2)
Re:Slashdotting represented by reactor meltdown (Score:2, Funny)
Re:open source alternatives? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Oh man... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes they did [gamezilla.com]. They also had SimCopter [gamezilla.com] 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 disappointi
Re:Cool, but not THAT cool (Score:2)