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Comment by tyweir | Hacker News Reader

Last.fm has (or had) something similar and quite sexy as well: http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control

Three Rings (the guys behind Puzzle Pirates) have something, too.

My favorite feature was hooking it up to loudspeakers and playing a particular sound from their game every time the business made money, with the sound corresponding to how much money they made.

They eventually disabled it, because the constant interruptions were starting to annoy people. This is a nice problem to have.

I remember reading years ago that Amazon had a similar feature in their warehouse in their early days. They also had to turn it off once it became a constant ringing bell!

It's still nice feedback to have in the beginning. Makes it feel like you are actually accomplishing something.

Their idea of hooking up an analog meter to measure the average website response time is really nice.

Makes for a whole new experience. I'm still holding out for the first steampunk status board though.

Those are my gauges (although I no longer work for last.fm) - the code and design notes for them are up on Github:

http://github.com/russss/arduino-gauges

I also helped out with the analogue tweet-o-meter from a couple of weeks ago:

http://vimeo.com/9352631

thanks for sharing the code!

37Signals have also something like this, http://37signals.com/svn/posts/879-feeling-the-pulse-with-qu...

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