Perhaps the most annoying thing about delving into website analytics is the lag time. As a web worker you need to make decisions quickly and often you simply want to know what's happening (how many people are actually visiting) on your public Web presence right now, not yesterday.

Whos.amung.us is a very elegant, very innovative, real-time visitor counter which displays the total number of visitors on your site at any given moment. The widget is tremendously easy to install and requires no registration - just copy and paste the code provided when visiting whos.amung.us, paste it in and you're done. At the time of this writing, the service cited over 2.1 million widgets serving 52 thousand users.  The widgets work on MySpace and other social networks as well.

If you feel like you still need information on the users that were on your site, use the companion graphs.amung.us to check how many concurrent people were on your website or blog in the past, down to the hour. There is also a strong Firefox extension available for those obsessed with their site statistics.