Last.fm - for music, Alexa.com - for sites. What else?

    ... and there are similar projects for software!

    Nowadays, when people are completely obsessed with privacy, there are many live services for which you need to voluntarily install a program (guard, trojan!) That sends various completely private information to BIG DATABASE. It would seem that the idea of ​​creating such a service is doomed to failure, but no, these services have enough users. Why so? Yes, because you can get interesting statistics :)

    I decided to consider 4 services that accumulate data about the software used by users.

    The primary goal of such projects is to accumulate data from the maximum number of users in order to analyze this data and highlight the most popular programs from hundreds of thousands of existing ones. The secondary goal is to bring people into groups according to their preferred software in order to solve common problems and create a thematic IT community.


    Software.Informer.com


    Software informer is an absolutely simple and practical service. An elegantly made client tells the server which programs are installed on your computer. The same client will remind you if any of the programs you installed is updated and will leave a comment.

    software.informer client for Windows

    The site is a very high-quality software catalog, divided into categories and containing all the necessary information about the programs. Global statistics, however, are very limited: it shows only which program the number of users has been installed on, and its popularity is determined by this parameter. Those. Informer does not take into account how much time users spend in the program, which does not always allow us to reliably evaluate its usefulness. You can also see a list of the most "prolific" developers and a list of their programs.

    software.informer

    Ybex.com


    Ybex is a Russian project. The client doesn’t have such a plan at all as in the informer and does not provide any functionality to the user, but only sends data to the server. Ybex takes into account the operating time in various applications in detail, so that you can not only see how many users use this or that program, but also get information about the operating time for any period of time, so that it can be used as a personal time tracker. For each program, you can see the popularity of versions used by other users and find out if it's time for you to update.

    ybex.com
    ybex.com

    Ybex Rank is the program’s position in the popularity rating, calculated using a simple formula, as the ratio of the total duration of use and the number of users, something like the alexa rating for software. Wherever possible, programs are sorted precisely by this rank.

    The main features of the social network are also present: there are groups and blogs, and the program descriptions, links and tags are added and adjusted by the users themselves. Thanks to the privacy settings, any user can specify who should show data about what he does at the computer and who doesn’t. The search function is convenient for finding people who, say, work with Photoshop for more than 10 hours a week.

    ybex.com

    Interestingly, you can view a list of programs that you do not use in order of decreasing popularity. On the main page, the pages of users and groups, the corresponding tops of the most popular programs with trends and charts, as well as related discussions, are kept.

    Wakoopa.com


    Wakoopa is essentially the Dutch equivalent of ybex. Of the benefits - a more fun look (well, Holland, Amsterdam!), The presence of icons for programs and avatars among users, clients for Windows and Mac OS X. It

    wakoopa.com

    is possible to compare the popularity of any two programs on the chart.

    wakoopa.com

    The Windows client can inform you about various events - for example, if your friend has installed some new program. Of the minuses, the statistics here are not as detailed as in ybex, so you won’t be able to see reports by hours and days, popularity of different versions, and some other interesting data.

    RescueTime.com


    RescueTime is a purely personal time tracker, it does not provide any global statistics, but it helps to figure out where your own time is running away. Of the projects under consideration, only rescuetime is able to accumulate information about which sites you go to and for how long. You can group the programs you use (more precisely, put tags for them) and then build reports on these groups. For example, you can add the tag “work” to all applications and sites related to work and then see how much time you spent on work at any time.

    RescueTime.com

    The analytical capabilities of this project are very developed, so if you do not want to pay money for a full-fledged desktop tracker such as Smart WorkTime Tracker, RescueTime may well be enough for you. By the way, for money you can get an account with the ability to view data from a group of users (a feature obviously for superiors :).

    Composing a resume I leave for you :)

    PS. I am related to ybex, I will not hide, but I tried to consider the services as objectively as possible.

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