Good things come in pairs, I guess. Yesterday I wrote about FeedJit’s new visitor mapping widget. Today, whos.amung.us, a real time traffic widget that we covered back in March, released a Flash based map widget that also shows the physical location of website visitors. See it at maps.amung.us.
There are many other tools that do exactly this, but the maps widget is paired with the basic traffic widget that shows the number of visitors on a site at any given time, and it also updates without page refreshes (Feedjit does not). We included the original whos.amung.us widget on TechCrunch until it started to slow the site down, then ditched it fast. For smaller sites, though, its fun to know how many visitors you have at any given time, and where they are located.
Whos.amung.us first launched on the TechCrunch forums. They say they’ve now served 2.5 billion widget views in the last six months. The company has gone from being a one-man shop to four employees since then – they need a revenue model to support that headcount soon.
You’re online right now!!!!! Read that email I just sent you under “contact.” You and I work on the same daily clock….
the email about the professional lacrosse league? was a little confused.
An auto updating traffic map is awesome – there is no other word to describe it.
The catch 22 is that it is more entertaining for high traffic sites than it would be for the others.
However, if you discontinued your version of Whoamungus – at least put the Sitemeter widget back on the homepage. They have a map option that does not slow down the page.
It used to be fascinating watching all the visitor locations when you got Digg homepages during different times of the day.
http://digg.com...es_Live_To_Tell
Sorry I’m talking about your annual Tech Crunch party. You’ve got a hell of a thing going and I admire the way you’ve created a hot ticket out of being knowledgeable and sociable with the proper decision makers out there.
I could pitch a new cool sports team in a new market but that only goes so far, especially when you’re talking about lacrosse in Oregon. I want to find out how you made your annual event so prominent in the social “who’s who” of the tech industry. I’m thinking out of the box and I’d like to have the decision makers of Portland hanging out at our place. Our owner is a borderline celeb in the town and she just needs to get her face out more. I’d love to have the sports editor for the local daily newspaper here… along with some potential sponsors and the top dogs from the Seahawks and Blazers.
People want to be a part of what you’ve put together for a few reasons, but one of those justifications is because you’re rocking it out annually with the best of the best and you’ve got a party where’s you need to be seen if you want to get ahead.
This all may seem weird but I appreciate what you’ve done to make the tech industry cool and I want to convey a lot of the same feeling here in Portland with what I’m doing.
Hey, at least you’ve got to take note that you’re overlapping industries and the sports world has taken note. Some friends in Colorado with the Nuggets pointed your site out to me and I’ve been following along for awhile. Greatest respect sir.
-Trent
PS – I’m really sorry to take up your comment space! we can communicate directly if you like.
Yoorl.com has the exact same features, except it works independently of the resource, and tracks the links you share via IM etc.. So anyone can track in real time, who’s watching a link that’s being shared.
Trent – ping me again by email (it’s on the about page). Happy to talk.
Europe is ONLINE. wow. we need to have a conference or something there.
I wonder why you did not talk about http://www.neoworx.net .
They have several fantastic ways to show trafic. Have a look and talk about them…they deserve it.
You can see an example of it at http://cad.blog...visitantes.html
Its a great ap, but they need a better UI – those red and pink dots look like measle spots – I have a hard time scrolling near that map – it freaks me out! : (
- Pandu
@ http://www.fewtureweb.com
You can customize the map many different ways here: http://maps.amung.us/customize
Damn! I’m the only guy from Côte d’Ivoire!
Interesting, but how is this different from the mapping features that are available in Google Analytics?
I added the other one to my site yesterday. adwordseditor.blogspot.com . There are SOOOO many sites that are doing the same crap. same widgets, same feed tools….
Just wondering – what kind of value does this provide to the users viewing the webpage? Is it just another pretty widget that does pretty much nothing on the website? Is there any actual functionality or ROI in place for these map widgets…
I especially like the “crash my browser” effect going on.
yoshi you have a good point… what does one do with all this data?
I can see the case if you have a blog that generates locally-relevant news… you might detect a big clump of readers in an area you didn’t realize was popular. Then you could write posts targetted to people in that area – but
why would the reader care how many other readers are nearby, or where the other ones are? The map is competing with ad space the blogger might otherwise use to monetize their writing work…
These kind of maps kind of a fad on myspace right now – the exception
is for travelling bands who care a lot about where their fans live; we’ve made a specialized map widget for bands to map their shows at http://gruvr.com that is an interesting contrast.
This thing is really slowing down the site.
Regarding Google’s services, don’t miss the Google Analytics Reporting Suite built with Adobe AIR by aboutnico.be.
Now it has almost all features of the original Google Analytics Service and it is on desktop not browser. Some of them will be un-locked soon. This screen shot gives the feeling of application:
Anyone interested can participate in the beta (the link i provided refers to the detailed info with screen-shots and registration form). Beta will start as soon as needed number of participants will be reached.
Sorry, I overlooked the images is deprecated in comments (this is right) so screen shot is missed.
Anyway, you can see them all by the abovementioned link.
What makes this unique, besides that it’s live, is that you can use our less invasive ‘online count’ only widget which comes in two sizes, regular and small (both found in showcase: http://whos.amung.us/showcase), and by clicking on those widgets you can still view a map on our stats page without having to embed the map on your site.
So for those people who already use our classic widget, they have the map right there on their stats pages.
As an expansion of our Visit Widget (http://www.visitwidget.com) line of tracking widgets, we’re going to release a Flash map widget this week that is significantly different from the two widgets here. First of all, ours will allow you to drill down from a world map to a regional map to a country map. For a few countries (more to come later) the widget will show data for individual states/provinces as well. In the meantime check out our other tracking widgets (no sign up whatsoever). Any comments are really welcome.
http://www.w3co.../countries/20/0
Speed is everything.
If a widget slows down my site by even a few milliseconds, I dump it. I’ve been a blogger for many years, so the first thing we took care of with Feedjit was to make it massively scalable.
We currently have many very high traffic websites that serve more than 1 page per second. Many of our users get spikes from sites like Digg or Slashdot and we take those in our stride too.
Speed is also everything when it comes to data delivery. Feedjit is a real-time widget which means that we generate data on the fly. When you visit a website with Feedjit installed you see yourself and your geographic location at the top of the list. Providing real-time data and maintaining an extremely high performance level are not trivial problems to solve.
Here’s why speed matters when it comes to page load time. This is from an article titled “Gone in 4 seconds – Why your page load speed matters”. It shows that if your page load time drops by just a few milliseconds, you lose money.
*snip*
Google’s Marisa Meyers also had something to share about speed at the recent Web 2.0 conference.
According to Meyers – after polling Google users, she heard a lot of requests for Google to expand it’s search result listing on it’s main page. From the current 10 to 20 or 30.
So Google tried doing this for a select group of users. What they found is that expanding the search caused Google’s ad revenue from that page to plummet by 20%.
The reasoning was that the expanded search results caused the page to load significantly lower. A page with 10 results took .4 seconds to load. A page with 30 took .9 seconds.
This turned off users – even though in polls, the users had requested more search results on the page.
A half a second delay caused revenues to drop significantly.
The full article here:
http://blog.min...-speed-matters/
*snip*
We have a growing number of professional bloggers using Feedjit. If I were to suggest that our widget is so cool that it’s worth losing 20% of their revenue, I’m sure you can guess what they’d tell me to go and do.
So speed is everything and we spend a lot of time on monitoring performance and constantly improving it.
Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO
ps: If you’re interested in the subject of content delivery performance, check out this article by Aaron Hopkins of Google. It’s a nice intro and has a few simple changes you can make to get an immediate boost in performance:
http://www.die....page_load_time/
I just saw whos.amung.us in the #1 slot on digg.com . Usually servers die when they get that much traffic, but whos.amung.us still seems to be pretty quick.
The map looks pretty neat, and I think i’ll put it on my blog. If that long post from feedjit tells us anything, it’s that feedjit is dead in the water.
W3Counter has been on front page of Digg 4 times so far this year. Traffic from a Digg link is nothing compared to the simultaneous visits to thousands of websites a service like this already deals with.
Seems to be good widget again..Can you suggest something which shows that this particular blog has received a new comment or some info regarding the comments…It would be of great help…I guess you might be using it too..
There is no red dot on the island I’m sending this comment from:p
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I installed maps.amung.us and it started working fine right away. But the next day it was slow to load and did not “see” several visitors to my website from different countries. Sometimes it does not load at all or shows “no visitors”. Later it will get back. My site gets only few clicks per day. I know about visitors from my host’s Awstats. I have fast cable internet provider.
Can anybody help how ro get maps.amung.us working , and faster and to register all visitors?
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Ive seen better but i cannot remember where for the life of me!!
Many Blogger wants to hide their live feedjit window from display, here is the way http://www.ialw...live-stats.html
I copied and pasted my custom code for the mapping widget into a text widget (I use WordPress) and published / saved it. I then opened up my site and it did not show up. Trust me, it was not because it hadn’t loaded… But what did show up was ‘Get your Own Real Time Visitor Map’, which then redirected you to make a mapping widget??? So it’s not like it is not there, it’s just that the actual map is not showing up…
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Any Help?