Welcome to Measure Map, by Jeffrey Veen

Welcome to Measure Map

Last week, my old friend Kevin Lynch from Macromedia stood on stage at the Web 2.0 conference and introduced the audience to Adaptive Path's first product, Measure Map. As he clicked around the application, he described how Flash, Ajax, HTLM, CSS, Javascript, Action Script and everything else behind the scenes had been blended together seamlessly in our product. Kevin affirmed our strategy of exploiting appropriate technologies to build the best possible experience for the people using our site, rather than showing off what we could do. It was a thrilling demo for me, after all these months of work. (You can watch the video of his session here.)

The product Kevin showed has been a long time coming. When we founded Adaptive Path way back in 2001, we talked about it being a user experience company - something more than a consulting agency or design shop. To us, that meant bringing our philosophies and heuristics of good design to a variety of disciplines: client work, events, publishing ... and even products. And it became clear at the beginning of 2005 that our company was mature enough to support a small development team in an endeavor to to build something new. Measure Map is the output of that effort.

Here is our quick pitch: Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. We do this by collecting and analyzing blog-specific traffic statistics and presenting them in a browsable interface that encourages exploration. It is an experience that offers meaningful insight into the effects caused by small changes in how you blog, rather than the overwhelming complexity of most web stats tools with their query/report-style analytic methods. Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs.

We do this with a few lines of code in your blog's template; there's hardly any configuration to worry about. We collect your traffic data continuously and in real time and display it through some innovative Ajax-based techniques. But even though we're a hosted service, you own your data. An open API will empower you to do whatever you like with your numbers -- we've already built an OS X Dashboard widget, for example. Imagine what else you could do with your blog's stats...

We'll be opening the doors soon -- probably towards the end of the year. For now, we're metering our growth with an invitation system to ensure that we can provide an appropriate level of service for our users as we grow. You can sign up for one at measuremap.com.

In the coming weeks I'll be writing more about Measure Map, the experience of building it, and what our plans for it are. But for now, I'm just so happy our little team has reached this milestone. Now back to work.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 12 October 2005 at 9:13 AM. It was filed under Technology. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 12 October 2005 at 9:28 AM Thomas wrote:

So... what is Measure Map's price tag?

2. On 12 October 2005 at 9:34 AM Jeremy Flint wrote:

Looks like a great product. Can't wait to get my hands on it and mess around with it.

3. On 12 October 2005 at 9:36 AM veen wrote:

That's my favorite question, Thomas. And my favorite answer is, "How much would you expect to pay?" ;)

Actually, we've been joking about printing up t-shirts that say, "Yes! There will be a free version!" to wear while demoing the app.

We've got a pretty good plan for which features will cost a few bucks a month, but rest assured that you'll be able to sign up for an account on Measure Map for free.

4. On 12 October 2005 at 9:38 AM Josh Dura wrote:

Is HTLM Web 2.0? :)

Nah, seriously, looks like a great app, can't wait to get my hands on it. Congrats!

5. On 12 October 2005 at 10:25 AM Marcus wrote:

Good timing. My company bought a Mint license yesterday but have been having a helll of a time getting all of that PHP to play nice with our Ruby.

We got linked to O'Reilly's Radar this morning and I'm dying for a good analysis of my traffic. (Here's hoping for a beta account:)

6. On 12 October 2005 at 10:26 AM B. Adam wrote:

There are some really cool ideas in there -- I might just have to shamelessly borrow a few of them :)

If you don't mind me asking, how flexible are those "blockup" pictures? Visitors, Links, Comments, etc ... If I, say, wanted to block up search results or monitor resolution instead of comments or links, could I? And if not, why not?! Huh? WHY NOT?!?! :)

7. On 12 October 2005 at 12:12 PM Knut Karnapp wrote:

Well, listening to your second we05 presentation concerning, among others, measure map was quite amazing. Although I´m still wondering if we´re getting the full version some time soon ;-)

What I like most about MM would be the live stats feature. Very nice. My present awstats only serves refreshing in 1 hour terms. Sadly.

8. On 12 October 2005 at 12:16 PM sean wrote:

looking forward to playing with it. congrats to you and the team, jeff.

9. On 12 October 2005 at 1:02 PM Gregory wrote:

Seems very interesting. I've been having a lot of conversations recently about the accuracy and validity of site stats and how they apply to blogs... including some ideas about how to work with the data.

Will be interesting to see a solution to this implemented.

10. On 12 October 2005 at 2:15 PM richard wrote:

So does it work as a general stats package, too? Or is this specific to Blogger/TypePad and the like?

11. On 12 October 2005 at 2:35 PM veen wrote:

richard,

No, it's not a general stats package. We found that most web analytics tools are complicated by the fact that they try to measure *any* type of site - ecommerce, corporate brochure-ware, search engine.

By focusing on blogs and blogs alone, we could be very specific in what we tracked, what those stats really mean, and how we could present them in an intuitive and friendly way. Kinda like how blogs themselves dramatically simplified content management and web publishing for a lot of people...

12. On 12 October 2005 at 2:37 PM Justin Scott wrote:

It gorgeous! I cannot wait to find our more!

13. On 12 October 2005 at 2:44 PM Maxine wrote:

Congratulations to all involved for reaching a milestone like this. Sounds like a great product and perhaps more importantly sound slike you'll have some really well thought out ideas about pricing, and your relationship with your customers generally. Can't wait to see how it evolves.

14. On 12 October 2005 at 2:50 PM Eric Peterson wrote:

I'd love to see more (and I'm an industry analyst covering the analytics industry.) Any chance you'd provide a sneak-peek/briefing?

15. On 12 October 2005 at 3:05 PM Kyle wrote:

Signed up for an invite a few months ago, dying to try it out. Sounds promising, and interesting to see A/P step into the product realm. Can't wait to see that UX experience come together for all us bloggers.

16. On 12 October 2005 at 5:53 PM Ryan Carver wrote:

> Or is this specific to Blogger/TypePad and the like?

Just wanted to clarify that yes, Measure Map is geared toward blogs but it will run on just about any blogging platform. Currently we officially support Blogger, MovableType, WordPress, TypePad (basic, and with advanced templates). My blog runs on Typo and works just fine.

17. On 12 October 2005 at 6:29 PM Michael Martine wrote:

I like how you can subscribe to RSS and get MM stats that way. Excellent, and a no-brainer to boot.

18. On 12 October 2005 at 8:52 PM Yottabite wrote:

Can't wait to try this as well.
Congrats, AP, you guys do some of the best research in the industry - good to see a nice product coming from you.
Here's to trying this one out soon.

19. On 12 October 2005 at 10:12 PM Bryan Veloso wrote:

Wow, after seeing that dashboard, I'm pretty damn excited. Now hopefully I can actually get one of the first invites. ;D

20. On 13 October 2005 at 1:27 AM tybalt wrote:

Ok, some questions:

ad1) Why only blogs? Really, if you blogging by definition, you don't care what's going on on your blog. If you attention-whoring, well .. then yes.

ad2) Bloglike businesses have to use more complex or certified stat engines to get them advertisers buy their ad space. With this in mind, what kinda _real_ use do you see for your product?

ad3) Eye candy makes the world go 'round. We know that. Selling a product is mainly dependant on how it is looks and geeks are often amazed with a look of something. Don't get me wrong, it looks cute. But what actual features your product have to be worth buying, besides the cute colors and gfx?

ad4) Obviously it's a well-designed, well done product. You guys at AP know what you doing, but instead of a geek's sandbox, can I hope that your coming products will be as usable for small or medium sized biz's as 37signal's basecamp for example?

ad5) You do not plan to support small biz's with some innovative product which simplifies the life of the industry guys who are not necessarily blog-junkies?

Congratulations for pulling this off, I'm sure that it will be amazing success in the segment you aimed it at.

Cheers,
tyb

21. On 13 October 2005 at 2:19 AM Jens Meiert wrote:

What data does Measure Map track and visualize, precisely? Looks very interesting so far, but unfortunately, that's not enough to be considered an statistical alternative yet.

22. On 13 October 2005 at 5:51 AM Julio Alonso wrote:

Hey, it looks really interesting. Haven't tried mint (way to simple), but have tried almost everything else out there. Right now we run on PHP-Stats, but it's too old, to slow to develop, to machine intensive.

We are running a small nanopublishing company out of Spain (12 blogs, some 2 million pageview) and would love to test your tool.

Some questions, though:

- Will it be possible to see aggregated figures for several blogs?
- How are you tracking, if at all, unique visitors?
- Are you tracking links-out like mybloglog?
- Donwloading, exporting to excel of information (not just the raw data)?

23. On 13 October 2005 at 9:11 AM Steven Ametjan wrote:

After attending your workshop, and seeing the second presentation at WE05 I've been wanting to play with this. I can't wait for this to be released... God I'm such a stat whore.

24. On 13 October 2005 at 9:44 AM David W. Boles wrote:

How does this compare to the kind of tracked stats you get from FeedBurner Pro?

Are you gathering stats by forcing our RSS feed through your site?

25. On 13 October 2005 at 12:41 PM Jason Cosper wrote:

Very nice! I'm looking forward to throwing this on Preshrunk and ditching my very crufty [not to mention slow] install of ShortStat.

26. On 13 October 2005 at 3:38 PM anina.net wrote:

i think this can help me a lot...can you speed up the process woohooo!!!

anina
www.anina.net

27. On 13 October 2005 at 3:45 PM Amy Knox wrote:

This is an extremely cool and overdue app. So many people have no idea how to make any sense of their webstats. Even people who are doing it as part of their job. I recently heard the web director of a large, influential organization admit to "skimming the mountain tops" of his web stats because there was just too much there to deal with. I couldn't help but think there's gotta be a better way.

Measure Map is going to be great for the folks who're trying to figure out how they fit in the blogosphere. Nicely done!

28. On 13 October 2005 at 9:10 PM Trung Son wrote:

Definitely a very positive direction for UI with these latest "buzz" words

29. On 14 October 2005 at 1:41 PM Chris Baum wrote:

Congrats, Jeff & AP! Can't wait to check it out. Looking forward to using it. Could we be witnessing the first of an AP product suite?

30. On 19 October 2005 at 2:02 PM Rod wrote:

hey Jeff,

I signed up at Gospelcom... when do I get to try it!!! :)

31. On 20 October 2005 at 5:07 PM Rich Brooks wrote:

I just signed up for the invitation, and all I have to say is...

Pick Me! Pick Me! Pick Me!

(Was that too obvious?)

32. On 20 October 2005 at 5:10 PM Jason Golod wrote:

Wait, Banana Republic has tall sizes?

33. On 24 October 2005 at 10:07 PM Frazier wrote:

Well, it's nice to see people's reactions to YOUR baby! Jeff and Greg - good work guys!

34. On 8 November 2005 at 4:31 AM OMEITOR wrote:

I blogged about Measure Map here:
http://www.technewsonline.net/2005/11/08/measure-map-preview.php

Currently:

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About Me

Bio: Jeffrey Veen
Book: "The Art & Science of Web Design"
Book: "HotWired Style: Principles For Building Smart Web Sites"
Work: My LinkedIn Profile
Travel: China, Tuscany, Kayaking in Baja, Touring Costa Rica, Studying Theater in London

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Jeffrey Veen