application statistics

[Bryan Clark]

Hey ~

So we've been collecting some application usage statistics [1] on 
mugshot for a little while now and it's starting to reveal some 
interesting (and obvious) stuff.  You could look at evolution vs. 
thunderbird and firefox vs. epiphany or gossip vs. gaim.  It's a bit 
hard to pull enough context into those comparisons to really get down to 
the reasons why some are used more than others but it's a good start so far.

If you're not aware of the application statistics take a look the 
statistics page [1] as well as the recent blog entry [2] for some 
background.  In a nutshell we've asked mugshot users anonymously share 
their application usage statistics in order to determine application 
popularity.  Mugshot is cool and free and open to everyone [3], you can 
sign up today if any of this interests you.

So now we're moving this application statistics idea on to a new phase 
and are looking for ideas.  During our talk at FUDCon we showed a couple 
of mockups [4] of things we were possibly looking at doing.  While we're 
still touching on most of the different areas shown there we now have a 
decent prototype for the statistical application usage information and 
it would be great to drive in that direction for a little while.

We're looking into, as it was suggested on the blog, that we might 
provide correlations between usage such that you could see xterm users 
are more likely to run xmms.  However there might be other correlations 
that would be good to show as well.

Also we're trying to figure out how we can determine related 
applications.  Mime types are a bit of a mess to try linking similar 
applications together so we might have to ask people to help edit the 
information wiki style.  The application categorires are problematic for 
this as well.  Right now there doesn't seem to be any existing 
information on how thunderbird, evolution, and balsa are all email clients.

While our application pages don't always correspond directly to a 
project we've looked into providing doap [5] files for all of our 
application information.  Because of the disconnect between application, 
package, and project this might not work out but it's certainly possible 
to provide some information in this format.

As this mockup [6] suggests we're currently looking into how we could 
offer install links for applications thus giving a bit more of a 
application browse and download / install feel.  The backend bits to 
this all use yum / pirut to handle the actual install.  And we've also 
added a way to pull in more application description information as well.

There's a little bit more information available on the app stats wiki 
page [7] if you still have general questions.

Thanks,
~ Bryan

[1] http://mugshot.org/applications
[2] http://blog.mugshot.org/?p=353
[3] http://mugshot.org/signup
[4] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Category:FUDCon_Boston_2007
[5] http://usefulinc.com/doap/
[6] 
http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Image:Application_Statistics_Thunderbird_Page.png
[7] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Application_Statistics