Really? Measure Map + Google

I’ve known for a while that MeasureMap was on the market and looking for a good home and now they’ve gone to google.

I was lucky enough to meet the team there and get a very early alpha account to use on this very blog. It’s a beautiful product that demos well. Nice visual design, seemingly simple dashboard and like I said, it demos well.

But for me, that’s where it stopped. I found it hard to really grok all the info that they surfaced and I simply stopped using it except for the occasional check in after Jeremy or Dave linked to me. They promised that they would make this data meaningful to bloggers, but from where I stand, I can’t see it. Om said it “sucks wind” – its really not bad, its just kinda “ok”.

Now, they are a part of Google. It’s times like this that I’d love to hear what the real story is. I can’t imagine Google bought them because of the app itself. It hasn’t even launched (so scaleability is probably an issue) and its so micro-focused on blogs that it seems too limited (I don’t think Google cares about Blogger enough to buy it a stats package).

I’ve also been a user of urchin (not google analytics) and while it wasn’t amazing, I found it to be useful and it seems like they knew what data & functions mattered to folks.

So, if I were Google, I’d be taking the smart folks that made measure map and pair them with the smart folks that made Urchin (um, Analytics, I mean). And I hope that Google would say “ok, neither of these products was great, can you guys come up with a brand new thingy that does the trick?”. 0.25+0.75=2?

Like a lot of things in the space, it’ll be fun to watch. The whole idea of acquisitions is that “together we can do better than we could do apart”, for Google’s sake lets hope so…