6:37 p.m.
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_Thunderbir...
[7] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Application_Statistics
8:10 p.m.
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? 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.
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?
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.
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
10:05 a.m.
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.
2:07 a.m.
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
Cool Fedora wallpapers: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/wallpapers/
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org
my Fedora stuff: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro
10:37 a.m.
Nicu Buculei wrote:
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).
Yep, it's difficult to know if that's just the mugshot audience
or a
standard distribution among everyone.
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.
We could provide that
number, but I'm not sure it really explains this
situation better. The usage numbers show that among all people sharing
their application stats firefox is the most used application. The usage
count is only taken once a day for a 30 day period such that this number
won't continue to raise everyday after the 30 day period, it will likely
level out and only increase slowly as new people share their
statistics. Since the count is only looked at once a day the large
count for firefox users doesn't mean that they are using firefox a lot
during the day, but that a lot of people are using firefox everyday.
What I think you're getting at is the need to provide better context for
the ranking system. Such that if we knew that both firefox and epiphany
were web browsers (and the system doesn't actually know this right now)
we could say among "web browsers" this one gets the most usage or 40%
more usage than the next one.
> 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.
Interesting idea, it wouldn't be too
hard to include that as one of our
badges.
> 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,
Nautilus might be a bit of a
misrepresentation as we haven't been
filtering out "the desktop" yet which is nautilus but isn't showing a
different wm-class. This should be fixed eventually. Well it's sign of
the data, the correlation we show right now simply looks at the current
application and asks for the other popular applications that someone
running that also runs. Since pretty much _everyone_ seems to run
firefox, terminal, and nautilus that's the correlation we're getting.
That is slightly different from asking the system, which applications
are application $X more likely to run.
> 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?
We could certainly use the information to better organize applications
on the desktop. It might be difficult use dynamically created data in
the current applications menu which wasn't really designed for
additional data beyond categories. However a new type of menu might
take advantage or in terms of application search via a desktop search
system the application linking can be very useful. Other types of data
like tags or categories on applications might be another way to help
people find applications.
~ Bryan
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desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org
4 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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Bryan Clark -
Nicu Buculei -
Rahul Sundaram