application statistics

[Nicu Buculei]

Bryan Clark wrote:
> 
> 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.

As we are here on the *Desktop* list, I think it telling that the second 
most used application is the terminal, very close to the first place 
(indeed, as you said, not enough context to get to the reasons, but it 
seems one can't effectively use a Fedora desktop without the terminal).

I think one data point would be very useful to determine the context: 
the total number of counted users, for example right now Firefox has 818 
users and the terminal 764 users, but without knowing hte total number 
of users, you have no idea if this is 90% of users or only 40%. And you 
can't just add the number of, for example, Firefox and Epiphany users 
and declare this the total number of users.

> 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.

Here is one more idea: provide a widget (javascript, please no flash) 
which I, as an end user, can include in my web page/blog and proudly 
show to the world *my* application usage.

> 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.

Unfortunately the first 3 applications on the list (Firefox, Terminal, 
Nautilus) are so disproportionately used, that they inevitably appear on 
the correlation list for each other application,

> 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.

Asking people to manually edit the "related" info is the best solution, 
otherwise it would be hard to correlate apps like Gimp and Inkscape or 
Gimp and Fyre.
Could this application correlation gathered from users be used in some 
way in a distant future for a better layout of the GNOME applications menu?

-- 
nicu
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