From: Glenn Parker Date: 2005-04-10T01:16:56+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] Instiki 0.10.0 - On The Rails Alexey Verkhovsky wrote: > Popularity (number of users), however, is important to me, because I > want to help make Ruby a mainstream technology. Instiki success in that > department tells us something. Knowing how many people have downloaded an application gives you, at best, an upper bound on the number of people who actually like and use the application. You could add a little phone-home module that generated real-time usage statistics, but that would be evil. :) A more practical idea would be a simple poll, asking about what Ruby applications are actually used, broken out by categories, e.g. long-running servers vs. command-line or GUI tools vs. shared libraries. My instinct says Instiki is downloaded frequently for three reasons, 1) wikis are fairly self-contained, 2) wikis are interesting, yet easy to understand, 3) Instiki promises a safe and zero-hassle installation. So, people that are exploring Ruby see it and say, "OK, I know what a wiki is, and it would be fun to play with one, but I don't want to mess up my machine or get lost in some messy configuration scheme." The question is, after they've played for an hour or two does it ever get run again? -- Glenn Parker | glenn.parker-AT-comcast.net |