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Used to be easier to be a pretender on the web. Just take the visitor counter off your site and voilà!: pretend you’re a “General” like Motors or Electric. Google Benchmarking bodes a new day.

Today it’s all about transparency. Smart companies from Google to Zillow to Kelly Blue Book are making – what used to be insider only – information readily available in the browser of your choice. Instead of hiding their nuts, the winners are working hard to lay them out in the open.

Google Analytics Benchmarking (in beta) is optional and free. Benchmarking shows how your stats compare with other industry verticals. Yours or another.

It’s not the total transparency that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wants to see, but it’s a step in the right direction. (psst, Michael, pass the cashews)

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It’s rare but at least once a year we get woken up because a web site or web server is down.  That was early this morning and proof that you can have redundancy, monitoring and other fail safes but just like in life things happen beyond your control.  Life will always throw you a curveball but as long as you react responsively and intelligently you’ll be just fine.  We did, and everything’s cool.  

The events went like this … Client called my cell to wake me up, I researched the issue and then called IT.  IT in this case was my business partner Jason who I woke up and then drove to co-location facility. He quickly diagnosed the issue to be a failed UPC unit and within 15 minutes from the initial client call the system was back online.  That’s being responsive.

GMail has finally gone into an official public beta after 3 years of being an invite only application.  You can now sign up easily but you’ll have to give up your mobile number and then Google will text you the invite code.  

An awesome Google interface, 2GB of free space and millions of current users seems lucrative at first but few of them realize that Google actually reads the content of their emails to effectively serve up advertising.  Send an email to friend about breaking up your boyfriend and possibly a Match.com ad may show up.  A triumph for advertisers, I’ll side with the privacy freaks on this one and stick with good ol’ Yahoo.

AJAX certainly has its appropriate uses and I’m not talking about cleaning your toilets.  Launching in a few weeks is a cool project my team has been working on for about a month for JPMorgan Chase.  It’s a web application intended to help reduce the FedEx fees (which just went up this month btw) our client incurs by mailing application forms and documents back and forth.  Simply put it’s an online application management system, not terribly exciting at first glance but enter AJAX.  

Upon launch Chase users will be able to complete their entire application process online by filling out forms and uploading their required docs like business licensees, bank statements, etc. then clicking submit.  Designed with everyone in mind topLingo accommodated even the less technical user who is unable provide their documents in a digital format by leveraging a fax solution.  

In this scenario the user clicks to download a Fax Cover sheet that contains a unique encrypted bar code faxes it to our fax server where it’s then decrypted, PDF’d and properly routed to that users queue.  It sounds technical but to the end user they simply print and fax and by the time they walk from their fax machine back to their computer a big red X denoting a missing document will have changed to a green checkmark with a link to view and download the actual fax. Actually, I wanted a happy face or thumbs up symbol but creative shot me down on that one.  

Anyway, the impressive AJAX part of my long-winded rambling is that the browser never needs to be refreshed, or more importantly no interaction from the user is required.  There are no buttons that say “Check for the Fax” the graphics magically and immediately change from missing to received.  The code is AJAX, the programming is ours and the client is happy!  Ta da!

Welcome to 2007 and Happy New Year!  Lots of great opportunities in the web development world this year and just like each year before it some cool technologies and ideas will emerge and some will fade away.  And although personally I prefer to stay on the cutting edge of technology, the reality is that my business and my business clientele is about one or two steps behind.  Not a bad thing of course, in fact staying a step behind helps reduce the risk of investing into any unproven technology or concept thus wasting time and money.  So, with that in mind here are some things that we predict will be a hot topic for both our fortune 500 and small entrepreneurial clients in 2007:

• RSS Feeds
• Web 2.0
• Social Networking
• AJAX
• Paying more attention to the end user
• Online Marketing Tools
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Web Services
• Video in Flash

Most web developers’ philosophy on the importance of reporting web hits and web traffic via website analytic tools is mostly an afterthought.  Build the website, save the web logs and then when the client cares about stats, hookup an analytic tool.  Used for years, WebTrends is the most popular software on the market which is easy to install, easy to read, we bought, we use it, it works … but now we’re switching.

After 10 years of using a product why switch now?  Well, a new tool is in town and from a company whose stock is close to the $500 mark … Google Analytics.

Top 7 reasons include:

1. Hosted Solution
Being hosted by Google it’s the opposite of software packages like WebTrends who rely on your IT department to ensure web logs are current and integrated which ultimately allows more time for the IT department to do more important things.

2. Safe and secure.
Google takes the trust people place in them very seriously, and is pledged to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data. They understand that web analytics data is sensitive information, so they accord it the ironclad protection it deserves.

3. Integrated with Google AdWords
If you use this Pay Per Click service it’s integration helps calculate ROI easily.

4. Up to date stats.
WebTrends can be up to 48 hours or more behind in reporting.  Google is 24 hours or less and real time stats could potentially be on the horizon.

5. Piece of Cake
It’s not that we don’t like our IT departments it’s just that their time is valuable so installation and 100% use of Google Analytics can be done easily and without IT involvement.

6. Scalable
Any size site can use.

7. It’s Free.
Google’s competition freaked out when they heard this.