Freshly backed SpreadUbuntu and +147 Million Ubuntu Torrent Download and Trends (Statistics rock!)
Face-lifted Spread Ubuntu
Enjoying my position of SpreadUbuntu Cheerleader, here we go: The good old SpreadUbuntu site just got a face lift! Go get burned while it’s still hot!
Ubuntu Marketing For Human Beings!
Thanks go to Evan, the man behind the magic. To the Ubuntu Drupal team and especially to Michael. And, last but not least, thanks to Thorsten for the beautiful graphics and the constructive feedback on the site.
Download numbers and trends
To make the fun even greater we have statistics about Ubuntu downloads and trending: 147,395,976 Ubuntu downloads since September 2009!
Torrent Downloads since September 12 2009 - Yeah baby!
This nice picture is based on an SVG created from the data we have gathered. Go to the site to get the csv and analyze the data by yourself!
Yes, we have been tracking the official Ubuntu torrent tracker downloads and have lots of fun facts to share with you:
- A new release means a new download peak
- Ubuntu Download cycles seem to follow the weekly calender
- The Ubuntu Community seems to love the end of the week for Ubuntu downloads (Most downloads finish on Wed-Sat)
- Sundays (and sometimes Mondays) can be quite uneventful regarding downloads.
- First I thought that it is a good thing that we do non-Ubuntu related stuff on Sundays, but then I realized that maybe we are just testing the ISO’s downloaded at the end of the week?
- Mondays are always busy for everyone… No time to play!
Maybe these numbers finally push Canonical to release data on the amount of Ubuntu downloads from their site?
If you manage to spot other trends? Please share them in the comments 🙂
Rant
Now, will we ever get the http://www.spreadubuntu.com and http://www.spreadubuntu.org domains? As with any project in this community we are trying to appeal to meritocracy (the site is made and has been for the last 2 years) in order to get recognition (our fuel!)
PD: Mark, our SABDFL, noticed our project this time around! Now, give us more fuel, please! 😉
huayra's blog 
Thanks to thorwil for the awesome logo, icons, and share page.
Thanks to Lucas Kedzierski (nvbits) for the graph, which will be integrated into the site soon.
The way spereadubuntu is collecting stats is unreliable…because the official Ubuntu torrent tracker isn’t operating correctly. You watch the ubuntu tracker page and you can see its stats run backwards in the span of 30 minutes. It’s not operating correctly. Until the Ubuntu torrent tracker’s weird behaviour is understood the algorithm spreadubuntu is using to scrape data is not valid.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/spreadubuntu/+bug/408598/comments/3
If the tracker were running correctly it would be aggregating as part of normal operation and the algorithm spreadubuntu is using to scrape data would be unneeded.
You want reliable stats? Get someone inside the Canonical fenceline to fix the official tracker.
-jef
Hi Jef,
Totally true that it is not accurate, but I believe the tracker is good enough for trending anyway. This is also already been discussed in the bug you actually refer to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/spreadubuntu/+bug/408598b
And having some numbers, although inaccurate, does give us an idea of the general number of downloads and how download cycles (at least with torrents) happen. I do not blog this so it makes headlines anywhere, but if it does get some attention I really hope to get people started on the endless debate of the number of Ubuntu users and for Canonical to let us know more 🙂 Real data tracking hopefully helps to this purpose and let us, at least roughly, analyze the behavior of our community regarding downloading trends.
No I dont think you understand.
Its not just inaccurate… its totally unreliable. You have no idea if you are counting multiple complete clients repeatedly over and over again. For all you know the tracker wipes its stats and them recalculates already connected clients again. Seriously you have no idea what the tracker is actually doing. The fact that its wiping its stats at all is extremely suspicious.
You know the official tracker is behaving incorrectly. But you have no idea to the full extent of its brokenness. Get that fixed and you have a viable source of data. The assumptions implicit in the scraping algorithm about what the tracker is actually doing make for a completely unreliable counter.
All Canonical has to do is fix the tracker and make it collect data correctly. That’s it…job done.
-jef
Feel free to post this to the ubuntu-website list and ask there.
We believe our counter does give enough information for trends, and that is our goaL
It’s obvious that you believe what you are doing is sufficient. And that you believe the numbers you are generating are meaningful. I’ve also met people working on cold fusion research who genuinely believed their results were valid even though their data was corrupted. The sincerity of your beliefs are not in question. The validity of your data source is.
You know the Ubuntu tracker is acting oddly. Your site developed an algorithm specifically to try to address the brokenness inherent in the Ubuntu tracker data stream. This is simply bad analytical analysis without an understanding of its current operation mode. The Ubuntu tracker should already be providing these statistics as part of normal operation. The fact that it is not makes in total inappropriate to rely on until there is a written explanation of its current mode of operation that justifies the algorithm you’ve chosen as a correction. Right now there are just guesses and assumptions.
I cannot understand why anyone would feel is appropriate to take obviously malformed data stream and trend it. Garbage in…garbage out.
-jef
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Planet Ubuntu, Zuissi and Ubuntu Feed, Ubuntu World Wide. Ubuntu World Wide said: #ubuntu #linux Rubén Romero: Freshly backed SpreadUbuntu and +147 Million Ubuntu Torrent Download and Trends (Stat… http://bit.ly/be73n7 […]
Tweets that mention Freshly backed SpreadUbuntu and +147 Million Ubuntu Torrent Download and Trends (Statistics rock!) « huayra’s blog -- Topsy.com said this on 2010 November 1 at 2:46 |
[…] SpreadUbuntu, un sitio cuya finalidad principal es difundir ubuntu con diverso material relacionado ha sufrido un lavado de cara. Tambien publican datos de las descargas de ubuntu desde su sitio a partir del septiembre de 2009, en total: 147 millones de descargas!!! (nada mal) […]
Nueva cara para SpreadUbuntu « Ubuntu Life said this on 2010 November 1 at 1:10 |
[…] SpreadUbuntu, un sitio cuya finalidad principal es difundir ubuntu con diverso material relacionado ha sufrido un lavado de cara. Tambien publican datos de las descargas de ubuntu desde su sitio a partir del septiembre de 2009, en total: 147 millones de descargas!!! (nada mal) […]
Nueva cara para SpreadUbuntu | Ayuda Linux said this on 2010 November 1 at 2:21 |
Why does spread ubuntu say it’s copyrighted Canonical? I didn’t think any of the programmers were canonical employees and I didn’t think the website needed a contributor’s assignment in order to work on it.
What’s the situation with that?
Thanks for making us aware of this. It’s fixed now.
Hey,
FYI: I am checking into the domain and seeing what is going on.
Jono
Nice!!!
And yes… we should definitely have the spreadubuntu.com/org domain!
Kudos to all who made this possible!
Great work! This is very important work!
I find it strange that Firefox, a web browser, could have such a huge impact with its spread* campaign, while Ubuntu, a whole OS, doesn’t seem to care about it at all. That’s sad.
Spread Ubuntu should grow to a large community effort, with a lot more than just posters and presentations, with the full backing of Canonical!
The new look and feel is amazing, btw. Love the logo!
@Børge:
I completely agree with you. SpreadUbuntu could be the next hot thing after latex sweatpants. Sad thing is that not many people is aware of the site or care about it.