I’ve been using Measure Map for a while now on my personal blog. Jeffery Veen himself replied to an email I’d sent letting me know he’d give me an alpha account just because I had asked politely. Measure Map was a great blogging stats tool; very simple and yet able to communicate a large amount of information. I believe it was so good that it got Mr Veen a job at Google (when they bought Measure Map as part of the deal), where he applied the Measure Map approach to Google Analytics.
Obviously, at the time, everyone wondered what would become of Measure Map now that Google had a slick new Analytics product. Well, we’re still waiting…
While Measure Map continues to function, it does so like some mindless automaton, endlessly churning out blocks of Soylent Green, while all of humanity has died (and been fed into the hopper). The Soylent Green piling up at the end of the assembly line is slowly turning to sludge at the bottom of the pile, where festering colonies of cockroaches breed and multiply… well you get the idea.
Measure Map has never left alpha status. Try to look at your stats and you’ll get “Sorry, I’m having issues. Please try again later or contact measuremap@google.com.” about 30% of the time. If you are able to check your stats you’ll notice in the browser section that Measure Map has never heard of Firefox 2, all my stats show is version 1.0 and 1.5; same goes for Safari 3. I think Firefox 2 stats are going into the 1.0 basket since, apparently, 61% of my visitors continue to use that browser. One might conclude from this that no work has been done on Measure Map since Firefox 1.5.
Visit the forums and you’ll see no one has said a word since late 2007; the last official Measure Map topic was from April 2006 where the launch of an ‘unlimited’ version of Measure Map was mentioned. It appears to have even gone down for a few days without anyone at Google noticing.
I really like Measure Map and I’d be disappointed if it was closed down, but I’d rather know something than nothing. I’m just about ready to remove the Measure Map script from my blog. I also think it’s really odd (and sightly rude) that it has simply been abandoned — perhaps they’re waiting for all the alpha account holders to give up and go away?
So, how about it Google, Mr Veen? What’s going on with Measure Map?
Andrew TetlawiOS Developer, sometimes web developer and Technical Editor.
