After the wave of web counters in 90s, there were some services that offered "number of users online" (visits during the last few minutes, because doing CGI for that was not that easy).

Looks like we are now using a few more bytes to provide that information ;)

It's a cool idea though, I wish GA provided a public link to the stats you could share. Instead you need to ask people to provide their google account e-mail so that you can add them.

Sometimes I wonder how popular something is, so I figured someone similarly chart-inclined might get a kick out of seeing it.

I'd like to see a similar counter for something that reaches the top page of Yahoo News in Japan or the top spot on a main page subreddit. Those stats must be crazy.