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.

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.mindvalleylabs.com.....d-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.net/musings/page_load_time/

So for those people who already use our classic widget, they have the map right there on their stats pages.

Anyway, you can see them all by the abovementioned link.

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.

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.

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….

- Pandu
@ http://www.fewtureweb.com

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.blogs.com/cadptbr/r.....antes.html