Mapsurface

Over the weekend I was notified that my beta account for Mapsurface was ready. I was definitely excited and I didn’t waste any time in adding the Javascript to my latest site, photos.christianmontoya.com. After a couple days of using it I can say with confidence that this is the coolest stats program I have ever used.

Mapsurface is not a replacement for traditional stats programs like Mint or Analog or services like Statcounter. It’s a very light (less than 5 kb) Javascript file that you link in the header of pages you want to track. The way it works is that when you press Alt-X while viewing any page that uses the service, a widget pops up that displays the statistics. Here’s amazing point number 1: the mapsurface widget uses Ajax so that it only loads when a user requests it by pressing Alt-X. This is far better than having the widget load on every page load, and the implementation is extremely well done. The widget gives you current statistics, so you can get an idea of how your site is doing each day. Here’s amazing point number 2: if you click “map,” mapsurface shows information next to the links on the webpage that tells you how many people clicked each link and the percentage of your total traffic using that link. This is the crowning glory of mapsurface. If you have ever wanted to know how people use your website, what they click on, what draws their attention and where they go, then this is the stats program you can’t be without. It’s like daily user testing, and far more useful than just a tally of how many visitors you have. Add to that referrer information and a graph of the past week and month and you have a great stats package, and it’s still in beta. The widget looks great too.

You can check it out for yourself. Visit photos.christianmontoya.com and press Alt-X to load the widget.

To learn more about mapsurface, read Andy Budd’s review. You can load the widget on his site too.

Last but not least, some screenshots of mapsurface in action:

As you can see the widget looks great.

Here you can see how much of my traffic has clicked on these pictures. The more red a link is, the more traffic it gets.

This is the statistics graph.

Problems with mapsurface

• Because mapsurface relies on both the location and unique identification of links to count the traffic links get, it has problems with links that are updated often, have their names changed, or just change position on the page. This causes problems on blogs since the links are usually so dynamic.
• Anyone can view the stats. I don’t see this as being a problem but I’m sure some people will. Apparently the mapsurface team might add in password functionality, but it’s not one of their core goals.

Final analysis

Mapsurface is great!