Eye Candy

Just one more reason why I love analytical data… it can tell you so much about any given user segment if you look deep enough (though one of my favorite classes in college was ‘lying with statistics’, i’ll assume this is un-biased). Wakoopa has just released The State of Apps Report for Q1 2009. Wakoopa is a service that relies on user-installed tracking code/applications to track application and online service (like facebook) usage. They’ve got a huge following of dedicated users reporting data it seems; taken from their site:

Since we started with Wakoopa, we’ve acquired over 525 million software usage data from 75,000 members. In total, 200,000 applications have been logged on our platform so far. Wakoopa users have also shared more than 3 million application recommendations to date.

The average age of a Wakoopa user though is primarily in my demographic – 26 year old males based in the US who are quick to adopt new software and services (“early adopters”). Taking that into account, the information drawn will still show a solid snapshot of what the tech-savvy crowd has been occupying their time with.

For example, Facebook usage is pretty much consistent throughout the day (in both working and non-working hours), with a peak in activity between the 4-5PM hours. As for new applications dominating the market, Destroy Twitter seems to be the winner for the Mac with two games being the most frequently used applications for Windows – Burnout Paradise and Mirror’s Edge. Other applications to note are the just recently released Twitter application Tweetie as well as a spike in usage for the Google Chrome browser.

As for IM software, Windows Live Messenger seems to be the dominant application used across all demographics, though 3rd party software like Skype, Digsby and Adium are more prevalent in North America.

See their results here, and install the application so that there will be a broader range of data for the next report!

The report was sponsored by media publishing company Pearson.