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Google has been working on adding a site speed report to Google Analytics for some time, but this week they made it available to all users by default. No additional code necessary, just dive in to Google Analytics under the Content menu.

Under the Content menu, you'll see Site Speed between Site Content and Site Search. Here you can access everything from the average page load time for the site to page load time by location.

The folks at BestVendor.com interviewed 500 developers and compiled this profile of the tools that they actually use. A few stalwarts predominate, such as Git, Eclipse, AWS, Dropbox, MySQL, and Google Analytics. But there were a few surprises too, including 23% using Notepad++ as their text editor and 8% using Heroku to host their apps. Many of the categories are wide open. All of those surveyed are from companies of less than 100 people from around the world.

It's no exaggeration to say that, sometimes, anonymity is a matter of life and death. Which is why it's important to know just how trivial it is to track down an "anonymous" blogger using their Google Analytics code.

Andy Baio, who runs the popular linkblog Waxy.org posted Wednesday about using simple tools like eWhois and Statsie to unmask several bloggers.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Google's SVP of advertising, Susan Wojcicki, announced a new feature for Google Analytics called Flow Visualization. It allows sorting by categories like Web browser or country, and it shows the flow of those various categories from left to right, moving around the site.

It's like a tree of information, with the branches flowing and merging as users move from page to page, action to action. Wojcicki and Phil Mui from the Analytics team also demonstrated real-time analytics, announced last month, along with a premium version of the product. Google also announced nine more languages for Analytics today.

Sentiment analysis is all the rage these days - the ability not to just track what is being said about a particular subject but how the post is characterized - and as we've written about most recently last month here no one really has a lock on this corner of the analytics market quite yet. This week a new entrant has cast their hat into the social media sentiment ring and you can be one of the first 200 readers to try it out yourself.

Google Analytics, the super dominant free web analytics platform, has to date offered analytics that were roughly 24 hours behind. The wait to stop waiting has come to an end and today the company announced that Google Analytics is now rolling out real-time reporting to its users. Update: Just when you thought that was a big deal, Google Analytics also rolled out a premium offering today. Details below.

This is something that many people are going to be very happy about. Real-time analytics startups like Chartbeat and Woopra (whom we use here) may not be among that group of happy people, but publishers and marketers are likely going to love it. You can sign up to request priority access here.

If you can't afford big-time analytics price tags, you might want to take a look at the CaptureSMB service from 44Doors. The company announced this lower-priced SMB version today that is easy to use and set up campaign management tools. You can create individual micro-sites with a variety of tracking tools and automatically generate QR codes and short URLs to analyze your visitors' behavior and traffic patterns across mobile browsers and various social networks.

If any company has a comprehensive view of Web browsing behavior, it's Google. Not only does the company see plenty of traffic to its own properties, but thanks to Google Analytics, the search giant has plenty of insight into average site metrics Web-wide. Not only that, Google shares the data from sites that have opted in to share their data anonymously – and KISSmetrics has packaged up the results into a handy infographic. Among other things, it shows a drop in Windows users browsing the Web and referrals driving less traffic in 2011.

For small businesses and startups, the selection of Web-based tools available for things like communication, productivity, finance and IT is seemingly limitless, with new products launching left and right each week.

In a recent survey, business app advice startup BestVendor asked 550 startup executives and managers which tools they most preferred for a variety of business-related functions.

For users who weren't entirely sure what Google's +1 button was all about when it first launched, the picture is getting clearer, especially with this week's launch of Google Plus. And now site owners can see the button's effect for themselves, thanks to new metrics available in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

Most significantly, a new report in Google Analytics called Social Engagement demonstrates the impact made on your site traffic by not only +1's, but also tweets and Facebook likes. The report shows the correlation between things like +1 button clicks and the amount of time users spend on the site, for example.