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.