Take a look at Complete.com’s graph of the top 20 US websites.  Do you notice a common element between them all?

Every single one of these websites offers a way for users to be interactive with the site.  Interactivity allows visitors to become engaged in the website, not just passive bystanders. 

It’s not just the US that’s producing popular interactive websites.  Holding the #1 spot on the Alexa Mover’s and Shakers list is a Spanish language photo sharing site called flodeo, up 1496 spots on Alexa from 1781 to 285.

The take-away?  Add some interactivity to your website and start engaging visitors rather than just talking at them. 

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It’s confirmed that Google is doing much more than just dabbling in online apps, they are now entering into the web based apps space with full Google force.  The new tagline says it all:

Search, Ads and Apps

Over the last year, Google has consumed the company’s Writely (creators of a web based word processor app), iRows (web based spreadsheet app), and most recently Tonic (web base slide show app).

Just the other week, a representative from Google said their goal wasn’t to go head to head with Microsoft in the office application world, but based on its new tagline, it appears that this is exactly what Google is doing.

Google will offer the web based office-type apps for free to the regular user and will license use for a fee to companies.  Yay!  That’s one way to cut down on pirated software.  Let’s face it - it’s difficult for the average user to pay the steep price for Microsoft Office. 

Will Google overtake Microsoft?  That remains to be seen.  The downside to web apps is that they are currently much slower than desktop apps – however much more convenient, useful, and now free. 

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Microsoft, the company that has made its fortune selling software, has finally accepted what the rest of the technology world has seen coming for quite some time.  The future of software is SaaS (Software as a Service) – pay as you go use of software as opposed to paying expensive up-front costs for static boxed software.   

Well, sort of.  The company is still clinging to the desktop model, trying to redefine SaaS as “a combination of desktop software and web-based widgetry” and referring to it often as “software plus service.”

Some of today’s most successful players in the world of Software as a Service are progressive companies like SalesForce.com, the CRM giant, and 37 Signals, creators of Basecamp and other shared project management applications. 

Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (the competitor of Adobe Flash) is the first of what they say will be other SaaS-type applications.  Steve Balmer says that Microsoft’s SaaS strategy may include a new round of acquisitions – potentially very large ones.    

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We’ve been doing a lot of integrations for customers with Responsys this year – an extremely powerful and intuitive email marketing software.  Just when we thought we couldn’t be more impressed, Responsys bought the predictive analytics company Loyalty Matrix. 

What is predictive analytics?  To quote Wikipedia:

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from statistics and data mining that process current and historical data in order to make “predictions” about future events.

I am intensely looking forward to working with the result of the combination of these two forces.  Responsys was already the most intuitive email marketing software available and I assume that the purchase of Loyalty Matrix will increase that exponentially. 

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As covered by Google Blogoscoped, the new “iGoogle” logo refers to the personalization of Google. I use Gmail and have customized home page with my favorite RSS feeds, but when is too personal too much?

I was surprised to find out a few months ago that Google Web History had been tracking ALL of my search history under my profile – not just for their own stats, but for anyone logged in under my profile to view! That’s when I thought things had gone a little too far.

Think about it… if you’re sharing a computer in the house, Google will collect and make readily available all of the searches you and anyone else has made while logged into your profile.

You may have given someone your Gmail password – if so they can now see much more than just your email.

Also, I sometimes log into client’s Google Analytics accounts – If I don’t log out and they have Search History enabled, I can see all of the things they were searching for and they get a record of all the searches I made until I remembered to log out.

Luckily, you can turn search history “off,” and clear your history, but like everyone else that I’ve talked to, search history was enabled and collecting data long before we ever realized it.

Google spins the search history feature differently. They highlight the benefits of being able to search through your OWN history to find things that you may have forgotten to bookmark, or didn’t know you wanted to bookmark until too late. I think there are other checks and balances for that, like my browser’s history tool and the results page link color change from blue to purple that shows which links I’ve clicked on in the past.

Google search history just seems a little TOO personal – what do you think?

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