The original site, Gilt Group, is a clothing sales store which has sales which start at 12pm EST. Frequently things will sell out within scarse minutes of the start. I imagine having your stats update 20 times/sec is extremely interesting (and exciting) for that kind of application.

They said it was mostly used to impress clients who came into their office and wanted a visual experience of seeing users rushing in and buying stuff.

Might want to have a look at glTail for that purpose as well. It also helps with showing management why you need that shiny new server. :-)

You don't actually have to wait, you just have to manually select the date from the date picker.

It's still not real-time: updates are about hourly.

Woah, thanks. I kinda feel dumb now.

Not for me. The most recent 24h is never available...

It's for the Hollywood-created movie star webmasters of the future! After all, in the movies, everything must scroll incessantly.

Kidding aside, it feels more useful if the rate of usage is slightly less than that in the demo... Seeing hits pop up in real-time definitely has a certain appeal!