Measuring and Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications

"Measuring and Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications" by "Keynote" was another interesting white paper on social media metrics I could get my hands on. This is a more recent paper than the one I mentioned in the previous post, so it has a lot of information about technologies like "social networking" and "rich internet applications" that hadn't quite matured by 2006.

The paper starts of with the idea of the "network as a platform" - where the browser takes over for the desktop environment (or even a micro-browser as on a PDA or a cell phone).

As the paper's title makes it clear, the most important issue being tackled by it is measurement and to a degree, performance. How does one measure the performance of a web site that doesn't load all at once or a page that hits the server asynchronously defying the normal laws of page load metrics?