I’ve been using it for two weeks now and yes, it is very, very cool.

When I was at WE05, I saw Mea­sure Map screen­shots in one of Jef­frey Veen’s pre­sen­ta­tion slides. I fran­ti­cally scrib­bled in my notes “mea­sure map — omg check out”. Just the screen­shot looked amaz­ingly cool.

At that stage I didn’t realise that it was pre­re­lease, and I didn’t realise it was the upcom­ing ser­vice that Jeff had been allud­ing to through­out the con­fer­ence. OK, so maybe I’m a lit­tle slow sometimes!

Any­way, I signed up to be noti­fied when it was avail­able pretty much straight away. I was insanely jeal­ous when Si got his invite first. It was like Gmail fever, all over again.

Well, I finally got my invi­ta­tion to try it out, and wow — it’s worth the hype. For those who read this far but are still won­der­ing what I’m ram­bling about, Mea­sure Map is yet another hosted sta­tis­tics ser­vice, like Google Ana­lyt­ics. Unlike Ana­lyt­ics, it’s been spe­cially designed for blogs, and was cooked up by the inter­face geniuses at Adap­tive Path.

Also unlike Google Ana­lyt­ics, Mea­sure Map only tells you a hand­ful of things about your site’s vis­i­tors — what it tells you are just the things that are use­ful to a blog­ger. It’s this par­ing away of excess infor­ma­tion that makes it so sexy — that and the pretty icons, of course! Sure, Google Ana­lyt­ics (or Urchin, or any stats pro­gram) could tell you which blog posts get the most vis­i­tors, where your traf­fic is com­ing from, how today’s traf­fic dif­fers from aver­age traf­fic — but you have to dig through the reports to cor­re­late that infor­ma­tion. Mea­sure Maps spits it out there on the first page.

One fea­ture I found by acci­dent is espe­cially use­ful — where you click the cur­rent date to adjust the range dis­played, it shows lit­tle mark­ers that cor­re­spond to your posts. So it’s easy to see how your traf­fic spikes around post­ing times — fairly obvi­ous infor­ma­tion, but still cool to look at. I don’t know if I’m sup­posed to post screen­shots or not so I won’t — trust me, it’s cool!

After using it for two weeks I have to say I’m hooked. I can’t wait until it’s opened up fur­ther, I would gladly pay a per month or per year or what­ever to have that kind of clean, sim­ple, rel­e­vant data at my fingertips.

Hmmm, a good review is meant to be objec­tive and post about the neg­a­tives as well as the pos­i­tives. The neg­a­tives are… ummm… that’s it’s not widely avail­able yet? That’s about all I can think of.