When I first came across 3D Live Stats my first reaction was to groan at yet another over-wrought method for conveying (I use that term loosely) web analytics data. The conceit here is that your traffic is shown as rays of light emerging from a rotating globe, whilst your search keywords float across the screen. It’s sort of like a cross between the Wrath of Khan and the Star Wars credits.
However, I’m prepared to give 3D Live Stats the benefit of the doubt, since their app is designed to hang in reception areas and on the walls of the offices of company CEOs, to give web data (or any other data, apparently) the glamour of a “Hollywood Movie” (according to their site). Since it’s always a challenge to get the high-ups at a company engaged with web analytics data, this may be a good thing. And at least it’s less ridiculous than VisitorVille.
Agree that it appears less worthless than VisitorVille. And agree that it will get higher-ups at a company engaged. In my experience, however, getting high-ups involved at this level of granularity is not necessarily helpful. Biz Intel teams might find themselves the recipients of “unwelcome” requests that do little other than satisfy an executive’s curiosity about a tidbit he saw on LiveStats – time that could be better spent providing analysis that drives the business forward.
Seems like this is modeled on the displays Google has in the lobby of many of their buildings. They have flat panels showing global search traffic as rays of light doming off a map. A friend who’s an engineer there ran through the various display options for me once. We both started lose interest as we realized we don’t know if the data was live, on a set delay, or a canned loop.