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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