The team at Flex in Motion have created an awesome new Flex component that tracks user behavior in Google Analytics, with hardly any programming needed from the developer.
Flex developers need only insert the following code into their Flex application to have events like button clicks, checkbox clicks, navigation clicks etc... tracked by Google:
<flexinmotionAnalytics:AnalyticsMagic />
The component is available for sale from the team at Flex in Motion for $110.

I was doing some research the other day to try and find out how many people have Silverlight installed on their machines, and came across this great blog post that describes how to setup your own custom variable in Google Analytics to track how many of your visitors have Silverlight installed.

By the way, the only information I found on the number of installs was data from Microsoft that indicated they had 1.5 million downloads of Silverlight per day. Note that the number of installs is always lower than the number of downloads, and there's no indication if its attempted downloads or successful downloads.

For comparison, Flash Player has about 12 million per day.

If you remember, a few months ago I blogged about a really cool AIR application that allowed desktop access to Google Analytics. That application is back in the news - apparently Google is officially supporting the developers who have built that application. According to Serge Jespers' blog, he says that the Google team is working with Boulevart (the development company) to support the application, and will host the application on Google's site when its released.

"Is Boulevart now working with Google to make this new version of the application? Their answer is really exciting. Google is now officially supporting the development of this app and Boulevart is in close contact with the Google Analytics team to make sure the AIR app has all the latest and upcoming Analytics features present. Google will also host the app on the Google domain once it is released. The release is now slated for the end of March."

Here's the video interview that Serge did with the development team:

At Adobe, I'm responsible for a number of marketing initiatives, including the Flex.org website. When I took over the site a few months ago, I implemented Google Analytics to track the traffic on it. I'm also running Google Analytics on this site, and on my curling website as well. I spend quite a few minutes of every day inside Google Analytics, which is why I was happy to hear that someone is working on an AIR based Google Analytics application, using the publicly available Google Analytics APIs.

I like Google Analytics, but their use of Ajax on the site sometimes really ticks me off. For instance, after you search for content, if you click to get more details about a page, there's no way to get back to the search results you had. You have to do the same search again. I'm hoping that Nicolas can create a better user experience for Google Analytics users like me.

Ryan Stewart has additional coverage on this at his blog.