I’m looking to put together a live map for seeing where people are coming from on our live stream. One format of this map would be a full-screen display at the ops console, the other would be a small map on the website itself. If you’re using this kind of technology, Id love to know how you are doing it, whether it’s with a monthly service, or you rolled your own code.What I’ve looked at so far:

Google Analytics: Doesn’t come anywhere close to realtime. Looks like about a 24-hour waiting period for your data. Looking at the historical data for the live site, it doesn’t seem to be all that accurate either. Numbers, locations, and durations of visits seem to be way off what we’re seeing in our feedback and in our logs.

W3Counter: Seems interesting, but their site performance/availability is a major problem. I smell scalability issues.

VisiStat: Very nice product, but a little spendy for what I’m after, considering its shortcomings. Live map doesn’t appear to have the ability to specify a timeframe. Either you refresh the page and it adds new visits to a blank map, or you leave it up and nothing falls off the back.

Feedjit: I use this for my blog, and it’s great for that (see widget in the sidebar). But I can’t see using this for a “real” site. I greatly dislike the inability to customize the widget beyond text color (I really don’t want it showing the geoblogosphere link, it’s completely irrelevant and a distraction). It too seems to lack the ability to restrict the map by timeframe.

None of these products appeared to have the ability to customize the map display, most of them had a map that was ridiculously small and didn’t scale with the browser window.

If you rolled your own, how complex was it? What was the cost for the geolocation data?

EDIT: Forgot about Woopra… Looks awesome, but it’s still vaporware.

EDIT^2: OK, so Woopra isn’t technically vaporware, apparently real people are using it, but it’s been in “beta” for a very long time.