The live globe

Live shows everyone on your site in the last 30 minutes. It is a night-sky globe where each visitor is a small critter with a name, a speech bubble for what they just did, and a place on the map. It is also, unashamedly, the nicest thing to look at on launch day.

Names and bubbles

Every visitor gets a colour-and-animal name — lime otter, violet capybara — derived from their id, so the same person keeps the same name while they are on the site and nobody has to read a hexadecimal string. Speech bubbles pop up as things happen: "visited /pricing".

Where several visitors are in the same place, they gather into a pile with a badge counting the rest, so a busy city stays readable.

The controls

• Replay the last 30 minutes — plays the whole window back in about twenty seconds. The best way to see a traffic wave arrive.
• Sound — a small noise on each arrival. On launch day this is either delightful or unbearable; it remembers your choice.
• Share a snapshot — renders the current globe as a PNG at social-card proportions, with the headline number and the time, ready to post or save.
• Full screen — for the second monitor, or the office television.

Putting it on the internet

Set the site's visibility to Everyone and switch on the Live globe option, and the globe gets a public page at /p/<your domain>/live with a copyable link. It can also be embedded in your own page like any shared dashboard — see Sharing.

A second option, Pages on the live globe, decides whether the public version shows which page each visitor is on, or places only.

Watch out. Think about the page names before you publish the globe with paths on. A path like /invoice/acme-corp tells the world something about your customers. With paths off, the public globe shows city and country and nothing else.

What the public globe knows

The public version deliberately carries less than the one you see signed in: place, referrer, channel, device, browser and operating system, plus the page when you allow it. No visitor ids, no intent scores, no revenue — nothing that could single a person out. Public live pages are not indexed by search engines.

Live is also the quickest way to check an install: open your own site in another tab and watch yourself appear. See Install the script.