July 03, 2009

Interpreting statistics in your favour - Second Stindberg boosted Snowglobe success


Today, Philip Linden posted a nifty little graph showing how many users use the Snowglobe viewer - a project initiated by him.

On June 23 I blogged about the Snowglobe viewer and announced it on Plurk - now look closely at that graph. Doesn't it make a significant jump from the 23rd on?

Truth to be told, on June 24 there was the official announcement of version 1.0 on the Second Life blog. And as much as I like the idea that my blogpost and Plurk had a little to with that sudden pike, the effect I had would be most likely dwarfed by the effect the official post had.

But this is a nice example how you can interpret statistics in your favor...

6 comments:

Zippora Zabelin said...

Another possible interpretation: there are still people reading the official SL blog! (that they are reading yours is obvious ;-))

Ari Blackthorne™ said...

Also, Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote a blog entry hyping the performance of the Snow Globe viewer. I suspect this also had a major impact on downloads.

There are many alternate viewers and (apparently) the current most popular are the GreenLife Emerald viewer and the Kirstens Viewer - Emerald for the additional features (like double-click to teleport, built-in agent radar that spans across sim borders, etc.) and Kirsten's for sheer rezzing performance.

When SnbowGlobe was blogged about, the only "feature" hyped was the silly (and all but useless) ability to zoom ridisulously tight on the minimap and the blazing speed of the main map appearance (which still takes just as long as the old viewer to show the green agent pips.)

Nothing else was said.
I had just completed evaluating seven different viewers and though I personally prefer Kirsten's for the sheer performance, it has (what I call) the "texture-eject' bug, where textures are dumped too soon. (face a direction, rezz. Turn around, rezz. Turn back to orginal direction and all textures are grey again and have to re-rez, etc.) SnowGlobe was announced the day after I had completed my own evaluations and made my choice. Since nothing useful (to me) or compelling was blogged about it (anywhere) - I decided 'why bother - it's an LL viewer".

So I settled on the Emerald as it offers the next-best performance (and the fancy features didn't hurt either.

However, I missed the bug-fixes in LL 1.23.4 - but that version is among th buggiest ever released by LL since mid-2006.

Then I saw Gwyyn's demonstration video. *That* is what caused me to even consider looking at SnowGlobe. I did and I am happy the performance equals Kirsten's Viewer.

Word of mouth is beginning to spread about SnowGlobe's performance and I suspect that like myself, most people will choose performance over features as far as Grid Viewers are concerned.

Hyang Zhao said...

you plurked it!

Anonymous said...

Ah the power of plurk LOL

London Spengler said...

What are the possibilities of throwing two coins and obtaining a face and a tail? 50%

Now, how are the possibilities of throwing a coin and getting a face, and then throw another and getting a tail? Only 25%

Statistics are useful, but you are right. Is hard to get any truth for them when they are affected by thousands of variables.

Kesseret Steeplechase said...

Well I'm going to believe you had a hand in it, regardless! :)

I actually stumbled across the snowglobe viewer in reading my listserv mails from LL. It's alright- I still notice quirks that after being out of SL for 6 month I thought they'd fix that by now.