Wakoopa tracks application usage in order to recommend new software, games and web applications. It has two main groups of users: professionals and hedonists. The professionals are generally developers or designers who enable the usage tracker during working hours and account for around 60% of users. Hedonists use Wakoopa to track games and entertainment applications. These users are stereotypical early adopters; what they use today we may all be using tomorrow.
The company just released its latest State of the apps report showing trends in application usage in Q2 2009. The report is based on 110K users of which 88% are male, although female users account for half of the top users. 40% are in the US while 30% are from Europe. It’s easy to bowlderdize a report like this especially when looking at trends across all users, e.g. Linux users have an entirely different usage profile to Windows or Mac fans, but there are some interesting patterns here.
Most popular applications
Firefox has clearly won the browser war in this group with 55% of users. It is the most popular browser across all platforms. Facebook is the dominant web site with 17.9% of usage time followed by Gmail at 10.5%. Twitter usage is growing steadily but still only accounts for 4.32% of usage time even though 25% of Wakoopa users are on Twitter. Windows Live messager is the most popular IM tool, followed by Skype.
Biggest changes in Q2 2009
Wakoopa Windows users racked up a huge number of hours on SIMs 3 in comparison to other new applications introduced in Q2. Tweetie is flavour of the month for Mac users. The biggest climbers in existing web applications were Habbo (a social network for teenagers) and Orkut (Google’s social networking site). Interestingly, the applications which experienced the biggest gains on Windows were both anti-censorship tools, Freegate and Ultrasurf, even though only a small proportion of Wakoopa’s users are in places like China where Freegate was originally popularised.
A day in the life
In case you needed convincing, developers are different. Development software is most used in morning and 3pm. Developers become less productive after 4pm when they start doing office tasks and entertainment. Peak application usage is at 4pm for everyone else. Most gaming happens on weeknights. Email peak is at 11am while social networks hit a high after 8pm, e.g. peak Twitter usage is at 9pm.
Age and apps
World of warcraft, the most played game, actually gets more popular with age. The heaviest users are 31-40. Over 50s are the most enthusiastic Skype users with 20.17% on Windows and 58.46% on Mac (talking to the grandkids?) while Asian users don’t seem to know that Skype exists.
Next for Wakoopa
Wakoopa now contains a database of around 300K applications and is in the process of rolling out services for large technology companies and research agencies who have customised use cases for application usage, e.g. an internet provider interested in usage across different broadband packages. Maybe in the Internet age, you are what you app.