Thumbnail Maps from ClustrMaps
Jan 1st, 2006 by Alex
I stumbled upon Creative Hedgehog and noticed a spiffy free geocoding service called ClustrMaps. The service provides an embedded thumbnail-sized map of the world, showing a web site’s visitors.
I wrote about open source GIS about eighteen months ago, and how it’s relatively easy to do. While geocoding data has been available for years, open source solutions haven’t been as pervasive I would have thought they would be. The large-scale solutions aside (e.g. Mapquest, Yahoo, Google), there aren’t a lot of embedded/API-model service providers out there doing it for free. At least not like there were with counters, guestbooks, and other widgets.
Since then Google Analytics was released. I’ll be honest, their interface is slick, no doubt due to Urchin’s work. They’ve reportedly had issues with capacity and the service (while free) also appears to be a bit much for some people to use for a mere geocoding service widget. One of the big pulls of Analytics is to determine what AdWords keywords are providing the highest ROI.
ClustrMaps provides an image-based solution similar to the one that I described. They use geocoding to plot web site visitors onto a thumbnail-sized worldwide map, which you then embed real-time onto your page. The maps are uninvasive and so far the service appears quite responsive (although the service is still considered Beta). They also alter the diameter of the plotting point depending on the number of visitors, to give you an idea of where the bulk of your visitors orginate from. The service is free for sites with less than 1000 hits per day. All in all, a rather clever and clean looking implementation. I hope that we start to see more of these little services popping up.
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