Major updates to Spy

We've just released some great updates to Spy. We made a 5 minute screencast explaining everything, so watch that, or read more below the video embed.

The biggest thing you'll notice is the new map, which adds a lot of life to Spy. Each dot on the map represents a visitor on your site right now. As visitors come and go, dots will appear and disappear.

When a visitor performs an action, a popup box will display next to them on the map with more details. The map can be zoomed in for greater detail, and the popup boxes will also have more detail in this view.

The popular data box is now on its own as well, instead of being part of the action stream. Previously you had to choose between seeing the actions or seeing the popular data. Now you can see both at once.

If you click any item in this box, it will apply a filter that applies to everything Spy, including the map. However, one change we made is that the visitors online figure at the top now always displays the global value, rather than relative to the visitors. We thought it was neat to have that value relative to the filters but it caused too much confusion, particularly when a filter for just one visitor was applied.

The visitors sidebar at the bottom now includes the time they arrived by default (before you could only see it when you zoomed in on them), and it also shows you how many actions they have performed so far, which helps find the most active visitors, which are typically more interesting to watch.

Let us know what you think!

25 comments | Jul 20 2009 4:25pm

Reader Comments

Another awesome update. Many thanks for all the hard work. And I saw myself pop up on map during the screencast!

Jonathan Melville Jul 20 2009 4:58pm

I like the update, and I might want to view that times, but I would prefer if I could "hide" the map and "popular data" block. The reason: I would prefer to view the normal spy data without scrolling down. Can you make the new feature be a toggle show/hide?

Thanks for your consideration.

sbi Jul 20 2009 5:05pm

While impressive, the map is not as useful to me. It takes up a lot of space and obscures what I am most interested in - what the most recent actions and the people/users doing them.

John Jul 20 2009 6:50pm

Map is a good idea, and I'm thankful for the updates that are regularly rolled out.

Not sure if map will be useful to everyone/most people - where visitors are located isn't particularly useful data, at least not for 'spying'.

But thanks for all your hard work :)

Steve Kryger Jul 20 2009 6:59pm

Love it, but two comments/ suggestions
1: the times on the visitor graph (above the map) are shown as US Pacific, not the time the account is set to.
2: I'd like to be able to extend the content view on the right. I've always found the content view to be the most useful part of live stats, but now the list is limited to 7 pages.

Duncan Riley Jul 20 2009 7:27pm

Looks great.

One suggestion, the ability to dismiss site messaging (specifically the "Learn all about the new version of spy on the blog!")

Frank Jul 20 2009 7:56pm

I think this is a really good improvement. The complainers are just giving the typical "it doesn't look like it used to" objection. Maybe tightening up some of the real estate at the top would help quiet them, but I do feel like I'm spying like never before.

sabat Jul 20 2009 8:26pm

Love it, but the map takes up a lot of screen real estate. It would be nice to have the option to collapse and open.

Holden Page Jul 20 2009 10:02pm

Nice, but I'd like the option to switch back to "classic" Spy...

Wa Jul 21 2009 12:07am

Also, I'm seeing multiple listings for the same person doing the same thing at the same time, like when the internet connection drops off and Spy start repeating itself.

Reloading the page doesn't fix this.

Wayne Smallman Jul 21 2009 12:10am

I do like it. Although I see no Spy data above the fold on my screen, just the map.
I would also love to see a back button. The remove filters link is too techy and unintuitive for my liking.

The search term would be very useful information in the popup.

Can it do something pretty when a goal is completed? Like flash, or popup a yellow box or something?

Adam Jul 21 2009 12:54am

Not really useful. Please give us a way to hide it or put it at bottom. Takes up too much space for me and obscures the value of the rolling list of actions.

Mike Jul 21 2009 1:55am

I like it :) thanks for your hard work

Hollywoodosis Jul 21 2009 3:55am

Nice timing. I was the top user id for about 20 seconds on your video clip! :)

Dustin Jul 21 2009 5:28am

Really like this feature, but would love a way to zoom like it's with Google Maps) more to country level or at least continental level (Europe), as our website is mostly focused on Dutch and Belgian users (

Jean-Paul Horn Jul 21 2009 6:44am

Thanks for your feedback everyone. I'll add a feature to collapse the top section, although you can do pretty much the same thing by just scrolling past it for now.

Duncan, I fixed the time problem. I'll try to think of a way to expand the popular data area.

Adam, I'll probably change it so when it's a *new* visitor landing, it will always show the full box so you can see all of their details. And I'll throw in the referrer/search for good measure. I still haven't come up with a good way to integrate goals into Spy.

Jean-Paul, agreed, zooming in further would be great. I haven't been able a map like this one (that scales perfectly for latitude/longitude, and is easy on the eyes (one color, etc)) in a larger size than the one here. I searched for hours. If anyone finds anything better, let me know.

Sean (Clicky) Jul 21 2009 7:53am

sick!!!

Wes Mahler Jul 21 2009 2:41pm

You know what would also be very cool, which should be extremely simple to add. Is the TIME ON SITE per visitor on the left-side while your at it.

-wes!

Wes Mahler Jul 21 2009 2:49pm

It looks great!

h Jul 21 2009 11:52pm

I think the data is interesting for an occasional view, however, putting all that up top obscures the real data I want to see in spy (which I love!). I would suggest the map and other stuff now at the top be defaulted to hide this info. I don't want to have to hide that every time I view the spy data.

PF Jul 22 2009 4:16pm

Looks very nice but not useful at all for me: All my visitors are from France so I only see a tiny group of blue and red colors concentrated on a square of 5mm (1/4") :-(. So as others have suggested I would like the ability to hide the map and may be one day the ability to display a map per country or region.

Otherwise I like the idea of active and unactive visitors (red and blue) and so I would appreciate a counter of the number of action in the list on the left a bit more visible.

Last: the ability to order (or at least to filter by) the visitors listing by number of actions is really something I miss (this remarks is for the visitor tab view, not the spy view)

ED Jul 23 2009 9:38am

Hi everyone, we just added the option to hide the map. Enjoy.

Sean (Clicky) Jul 23 2009 2:50pm

thanks for telling how to comment on a blog.

tuhina Jul 27 2009 4:59am

thanks for the option to hide it, however, I'm not sure why -- when most have said they don't want this info -- the default option isn't to "show it"

sb Jul 31 2009 4:25pm

People who don't like something are much vocal than those that do like it. Yeah, we had about 10 people say they don't like the map or wish it wasn't so big or wish they coulud hide it, but that doesn't mean the tens of thousands of other people using it as is feel the same way. If they did, we would hear about it. Instead we've only had around 10 complaints, less than 0.1% of the people who use Mega Spy on a regular basis.

Sean (Clicky) Aug 02 2009 11:45am

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Major updates to Spy

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