September 2, 2007

Feedjit Customized Widget Shows Real Time SiteTraffic

Michael Arrington

27 comments »

The Feedjit traffic widget launched a month ago and is now claiming some fairly serious viral growth - 3 million impressions per week from the blogs that have added it. When installed on a blog, the widget shows people who enter and leave the site and, and where they are located. Neither the blog publisher nor visitors need to register for the service - the code just has to be on the site.

Feedjit offers two types of widgets. The first resembles MyBlogLog in that it shows recent visitors to the site. I’ve installed it at the end of the post. Tonight the company added customization features to let people set the size and color scheme of the widget via Ajax controls. “Arring Town,” shown below, is my favorite for obvious reasons.

The second widget, integrated at the top of the post, shows a map with the location of the last 100 visitors. Hover over any dot to get more information about a person.

This is an excellent widget and is much easier to use than MyBlogLog. If Feedjit can keep growing at this rate, though, perhaps an early exit is also in the cards for them. There’s only so much extra space on a site, though, and there are simply too many “must have” widgets. It’s all gotta end sometime.

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  1. Don Wilson

    Never have understood the point of widgets from a business aspect, but this is definitely cool, nonetheless.

  2. Boogey Man

    it’s cool, at least initially - but what’s the real purpose…

  3. mike

    Another pointless crap to add to your page so you can distract your visitors from actually using and sticking to your own site. Don’t people who put stuff like this on their blogs/sites realize they’re losing users because of stuff like this?!

  4. Dave

    It could be a good idea to “ad” this to to your demographics page if you are a local or regional site/blog selling extremely targeted advertising. If you do not like to release your logs, 3rd party numbers are very helpful…maybe even worth a low monthly subscription if proven valuable.

    I think this is a good find.

  5. Derek Anderson

    Too many people love widgets to ignore their potential for profit. You can complain till you turn blue in the face but look at the recent stats released by slide.com…a million widgets created a day. Damn!

  6. Andrew

    like this one.

  7. Dave L.

    @Don:

    It depends on what the widget does, I think. If it is something that adds value to your site, like an easy way to rate things or leave comments or share photos, that you, the site owner, couldn’t do well/afford on your own - then I see where they would have a purpose. But if all you are doing is adding tetris and pacman to your site then I agree that they are nothing but a distraction. That said, maybe tetris would add some value to someones site.

  8. Elias

    I’ve had it for about two weeks now, and think it’s an excellent tool. From a blogger point of view, I can track where my visitors are coming from much quicker rather than crawling through my logs.
    As mentioned above, it’s a good marketing tool because it can prove the diversity and volume of your traffic as well to your readers.

    I don’t think you lose visitors - the script for example shows people leaving, and often I’ve noticed, they leave multiple times implying they check our your referral traffic but come back to read your content again.

    Widgets like this make good business sense. There are some things that do not always directly translate into cashflow, that are actually useful - and this is coming from an accountant! If anything, it adds a bit of life to your blog because it shows other people actually visit. Perception matters.

  9. Word Hugger

    I agree with the first two posts. I never really understood the need, but it is a cool feature none-the-less.

  10. rc

    very usefull
    i have it for a month now

    rc

    trading tennis

  11. Prem

    it`s really a cool tool for seeing the regions of the world who are accessing your website..Thanks TC.

  12. Adrian

    The growth isn’t ‘viral’ strictly speaking, Michael.

    There are other widgets that do similar things but not quite as well or as simply:
    wholinked.com
    wholinkstome.com
    http://www.top-referers.com
    http://www.gvisit.com/
    getclicky.com/blog/76/apiwidget-contest-winners
    http://tools.blogflux.com/whosonline/

    The next improvement for this widget would be a live scrolling display similar to Digg spy, eg, something like this:

    http://www.headzoo.com/live

    and also make the widget customizable, eg just show referrers.

    and they could improve their homepage to show trends in read stats eg:
    http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/tracker.php (which presents like spotplex.com) and this could be done without the creation of webmaster or webuser accounts.

    The founder of Feedjit speaks of the quick rise to its growth as a result of adoption by two high profile Japanese bloggers after coverage on http://www.100shiki.com :
    markmaunder.com/2007/scaling-from-0-to-40-hits-per-second-in-3-days/

    Without webmasters creating user accounts or web surfers creating user accounts (as seen with MyBlogLog) I don’t see much more potential for FeedJit - what’s stopping say MyBlogLog from replicating that functionality? I first learned of Feedjit at YC news:
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45104

  13. Adrian

    The growth isn’t ‘viral’ strictly speaking, Michael.

    There are other widgets that do similar things but not quite as well or as simply:
    wholinked.com
    wholinkstome.com
    top-referers.com
    gvisit.com
    getclicky.com/blog/76/apiwidget-contest-winners
    tools.blogflux.com/whosonline/

    The next improvement for this widget would be a live scrolling display similar to Digg spy, eg, something like this:

    headzoo.com/live

    and also make the widget customizable, eg just show referrers.

    and they could improve their homepage to show trends in read stats eg:
    blogstorm.co.uk/tracker.php (which presents like spotplex.com) and this could be done without the creation of webmaster or webuser accounts.

    The founder of Feedjit speaks of the quick rise to its growth as a result of adoption by two high profile Japanese bloggers after coverage on 100shiki.com :
    markmaunder.com/2007/scaling-from-0-to-40-hits-per-second-in-3-days/

    Without webmasters creating user accounts or web surfers creating user accounts (as seen with MyBlogLog) I don’t see much more potential for FeedJit - what’s stopping say MyBlogLog from replicating that functionality? I first learned of Feedjit at YC news:
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45104

  14. maurizio

    I don’t know you, but all those widget shows me in different cities every time I see them. And Always at least 200km from where I live.
    Useless.

  15. nbc

    I was reading this post and saw that the last user was someone from Perth, Western Australia which is a lonnng way from anywhere. Then I realised that was me… cool! Who knows what good it is but I’m still impressed.

  16. rc

    i have been using the map on my blog
    since it launched it is very easy to use
    and it really nice to know fron how many
    different places you have readers maybe
    the city location is not always correct
    but the country is correct my blog is very
    popular in europe but i found out i have also
    readers in australia and asia and america

    rc

    blog name: trading tennis
    you can search in google

  17. David Mackey

    Pretty cool. Though I like MyBlogLog w/its profile pics better.

  18. fistball

    I am not from Shah Alam, Selangor. I am from KL, KL, but I am still from Malaysia. So, is kind of accurate in 80%. But is still kind of cool.

  19. fistball

    I also found out that, there are actually plenty of Malaysian Readers!!!!! even …. “cooler”..hahahaa….

  20. Kevin Bartus

    I’m sorry - this is cool.

    Kind of like seeing yourself in those street cams in a store window - always a little bit jarring in an endearing way to see yourself reflected in someone else’s experience.

    Don’t understand all the haters - it’s not like the widget is required by law. Some bloggers will add it, some won’t, if you don’t like the overall experience, you’ll leave.

    Not like most bloggers are making money at this, anyway.

  21. Rajesh Shakya

    Cool widget.

    Rajesh

  22. Steve Ballmer

    Already in Vista, if you drill down!

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  23. Webee

    Nice plugin for instant stats of the readers.

    Webee

  24. ipanema

    So far I like it. It’s nice knowing where the readers are from. And I hope people will get to know the world map. ha! :)

    Now, those who search for sex/prostitution in my blog will be put to shame because only I know which countries and IPs search that. Now it’s out in the open, people would think twice what they type on search engines. :)

  25. Tony Wright

    Very cool widget– touches on the very basic desire of all bloggers to be heard/read… And unlike MyBlogLog, it attaches an identity (or at least a nationality!) to every visitor without requiring any sort of registration.

  26. Ron

    Shows me 400km away in different city and state.
    Not nearly as accurate as other geo locating solutions.

  27. lotis

    its cool, in that you can see where visitors come from, not just the country but from what site as well