application statistics

[Bryan Clark]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Bryan Clark wrote:
>> 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.
>
>
> As you might already be aware, Fedora has been collecting various 
> statistics [1] and extending this to understand what applications 
> users are dabbling with is very interesting. Integrating this via 
> mugshot would require two things
>
>  * Downloading and installing the client
>  * Registering with Mugshot
>
> Smolt is the profiler in Fedora that collects hardware information 
> anonymously in a opt-in way. The plan there is to install it by 
> default and integrate it with first boot.  The Fedora package review 
> for mugshot [2] seems to be struck on a licensing issue. Is there any 
> progress on this? 
We're making progress on this, but right now it's not done just yet.
> Would it be possible to integrate mugshot into first boot before the 
> Fedora 7 release [3]? In the first boot integration, the mugshot user 
> login or registration is  a tab in the same space as adding a new 
> user. That is logical but it would make it much less obvious since 
> most users probably would skip additional tabs or advanced option areas.
Yes, I think we'd need a different way to introduce Mugshot if we wanted 
to have it in by default.  Beyond the online services connections 
Mugshot currently also can help to persist your desktop window, theme, 
and background settings.  My guess is that introducing mugshot is best 
done inline with using the desktop, where the benefits are much more 
obvious.
>
> From the Fedora perspective it also important to differentiate between 
> what mugshot users in general prefer from what applications Fedora 
> users are using. A straight forward method to do is that is to read 
> /etc/fedora-release. Additionally if the users are using Firefox you 
> can read the user agent part too. Are you differentiating this 
> currently or is there any plans to do so?
Right now we are looking at the distribution so that we might be able to 
provide some context around which applications are more popular in which 
versions of which distributions.  We don't read the firefox user agent 
string however we have started, as a part of the install links, looking 
at the version of the application you're running.  Using distro specific 
hooks we can query the package system to find out the version you're 
running.
>
> The ability to install applications and provide more package 
> description with screenshots (it might even be user screen captures) 
> etc is very nice and is somewhat similar to cnr[4]. You could add 
> additional features like reviewing an application, comments, search 
> etc. Is there a way to split that out from mugshot? I think we would 
> want that in Fedora and it would be useful for users not using mugshot 
> too.
The application information is available to anyone, you don't need a 
mugshot login to browse it and see the information and statistics.  
However you do need mugshot installed to be able to install applications 
from the browse pages.  It would be pretty difficult to separate out the 
functions of mugshot, mugshot is doing per session statistics which 
would require an application running in a users session this is opposed 
to smolt which is doing per system statistics.  There probably is some 
things that can be looked at together, for instance server applications 
like mysql, and apache httpd are usually per system where mugshot 
doesn't know about.  Giving a similar set of statistics for system 
applications might be an interesting way to show how "most people run a 
wordpress server", but it would take some investigation into what kind 
of information would be valuable to that user group.
> Rahul
>
> [1]http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
> [2]https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=212003
> [3]http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7
> [4]http://cnr.com
>