We’ve just released some great updates to Spy. We made a 5 minute screencast explaining everything, so watch that, or read more below the video embed.

The biggest thing you’ll notice is the new map, which adds a lot of life to Spy. Each dot on the map represents a visitor on your site right now. As visitors come and go, dots will appear and disappear.

When a visitor performs an action, a popup box will display next to them on the map with more details. The map can be zoomed in for greater detail, and the popup boxes will also have more detail in this view.

The popular data box is now on its own as well, instead of being part of the action stream. Previously you had to choose between seeing the actions or seeing the popular data. Now you can see both at once.

If you click any item in this box, it will apply a filter that applies to everything Spy, including the map. However, one change we made is that the visitors online figure at the top now always displays the global value, rather than relative to the visitors. We thought it was neat to have that value relative to the filters but it caused too much confusion, particularly when a filter for just one visitor was applied.

The visitors sidebar at the bottom now includes the time they arrived by default (before you could only see it when you zoomed in on them), and it also shows you how many actions they have performed so far, which helps find the most active visitors, which are typically more interesting to watch.

Let us know what you think!