It's December and the holidays are here. While many have yet to commence in their yearly ritual of holiday shopping, our friends at Google, always well ahead of the game, have already delivered a full sack of offerings.

Wave, Real-time search, Goggles, Dashboard, the Mac version of the Chrome Browser, a minimally functional preview of the Chromium OS, free Wi-Fi at over 50 airports and updated asynchronous Analytics code have all been announced or released in the last 3 months. The new and updated products add to an already impressive suite. While they are all impressive and useful, the seemingly insignificant update of the Google Analytics tracking code deserves a second look.

In the past few years we've seen the rise of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) applications on the web. These apps speed up user experience by loading only the content that is requested rather than an entire web page. Google has now taken this approach and applied it to the primary page load.

Traditionally, absolute references to tracking scripts are just added to an HTML page, requiring browsers to download all that extra code before our precious content can make it to the user. Alternatively, the scripts can be placed at the end of the page to keep this from happening, but that just creates a window for users to perform trackable actions before they are able to be tracked.

The average web page, in total number of bytes downloaded, has grown more than 3 times in size over the last 5 years, 22 times since 1995 [Website Optimization]. Increased bandwith has made a lot of things possible, but it doesn't always do much to balance the bloat of the average web page against load times these days. In a world of constant and immediate updates through RSS, SMS, and microblogs, the web could always use a little boost, which is why the new tracking code is a welcomed update.

With the new tracking code we will see faster page load times and greater accuracy of tracking data. From a marketing perspective, this is an awesome improvement, making for happier users and more visibility into traffic patterns.

Google will continue its momentum into the new year as new products are released and those in the existing line continue to mature. It seems to me that this holiday season, Google is the gift that keeps on giving.