gVisit: A Nifty, Little Socio-Geo Tracker Thingy

26 October 05

Helloooo Seattle, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Barcelona, ...

Being I have spent a fair bit of time working with Geographical Information Systems (GIS), most notably ESRI’s ArcGIS products, I always perk up when I see geography put to use in Web applications and services.

Here is one worth an entertaining look, a nifty little socio-geo tracking service called gVisit, which is a free service that tracks the geograpical locations of people who visit your Web site.

By signing up, with nothing more than your Web site’s name and Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), you are provided with a little JavaScript snippet to add to whatever Web page you want your tracking to take place on.

You are also provided with a URI to which you can go and view your tracking map. Here is mine: gVisit for Wion Design.

The free service is limited to the latest 20 visitors to your site. Visitors are indicated as little balloons attached to a world map, in particular, to the city/country from which the visitor came. There is also modest advertising that is displayed on your tracking map as well. You can upgrade your account by making a donation of your choosing to support gVisit, which will increase your tracking to 100 visitors and will remove advertising from your map page.

The service is currently limited to sites that have no more than 5,000 visits per day; sites with more than 5000 daily hits are not supported. However, gVisit is expected to have an advanced (unlimited hits) account in the near future.

The simplicity of this begins to make you think of the possibilities to which your log data (and many other kinds) can be used, doesn’t it?

Interesting note: you can zoom in and out on the tracked balloons on the map. For the U.S., anyway, you can zoom in to such a degree as to see the frickin’ street that the user visited from. Cool. So, let that be a warning to anyone thinking of being bad; gVisit and likely other products to come will enable Web site owners to track you down personally, thereby making it possible to kick yo ass!

Check it out, gVisit.

I think there is unlimited potential in this area that rogue developers have yet to understand and take advantage of (rogue developer I am not, but ideas I have). Pulling data from various geomatrices and outputting useful, varietal displays of that data in beautiful, interactive interfaces is powerful stuff with a big future. Government and industry are already moving forward with it in big ways (though privately), and perhaps academia a bit less, but where are the public sector products? That area is wide open.