I signed up for “Google Analytics”:https://www.google.com/analytics/ the other day just to try it out. They take roughly 24 hours to retrieve data about your site but once you do the dogs are let loose and you get a ton of stats (very useful too). So this morning I decide to look at the stats, thinking it would be a normal stat viewing site, but I ran into some pure sweetness.
I won’t go into every detail of the site (sign up or view the demo to see for yourself) just so I can stay on topic here but I will say…the Dashboard is sweet! You can add, from what I’ve seen, any report to the dashboard AND you can organize the reports in terms of position on the dashboard…NICE. The best part of the dashboard is the use of Flash.
Several of Google sites use Flash (best so far: “Google Finance”:https://finance.google.com/) and I can never easily tell when Flash is being used until I mouse over. The widgets gel with the page so the only way to tell is the interactivity, which some **could** be ajax [isn’t but it could], or the right click menu. Their implementation of Flash is simply smooth, useful, and done right. You should seriously check the Analytics dashboard.
Bravo Google!