If you’re at all obsessive about who’s visiting your web site, what they’re looking at, and whether or not your visits are trending up or down or sideways, then my advice is don’t — don’t even *think* about — hooking up with the Woopra beta program.

Let me be more clear: Woopra is crack for the web stats junkie. To say merely that Woopra offers a real-time view of who’s on your web site and what they’re doing there is to short-change the product by 99%. It’s got eye-candy of all sorts, from its geographical world-view to its jazzy trend-lines to its scrolling ticker of current trend factoids. Oh… and did I mention that you can start a live chat with a web visitor if you like?

Sure I’ve got some bones to pick… nits, really. For example, while Woopra *does* have a Mac client it requires the latest beta of Java, which in turn runs only on latest version of OSX, to which I haven’t yet migrated. And so I’m running the Woopra client in a Windows XP window in Parallels’ Coherence mode. (Come to think of it, that’s pretty slick, too.)

So go ahead and take a look at Woopra if you must… but don’t plan to get anything else done for a while.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you.