Facebook and Mozilla Firefox are the applications used most across different platforms, according to data collected by Wakoopa, a software-oriented social network. The Amsterdam-based startup offers a small download client that’s installed on the desktops of its 75,000 users.
Twitter clients Tweetdeck and Twhirl are continuing to see strong usage and growth, much like Twitter. The most popular newcomer among Twitter clients, as well as overall apps, for the Mac is Destroy Twitter. These numbers are in sync with web usage data reported by others research companies as well.
The more interesting part of the report is the browser usage: Google Chrome is making a significant impact on the browser market, with 15 percent usage across all countries and age groups. The Opera browser market, by comparison, has its highest adoption levels in Europe.
When I was looking through the report shared with us, one thing that struck me was how people below 30 are completely ambivalent towards Microsoft’s (s msft) Internet Explorer and prefer using alternative browsers. If this trend continues, Microsoft might have big browser issues on its hands.
Interesting figures. What Om is forgetting though is that Wakoopa’s userbase is not very representative for the total internet population. Its report are thus heavily ‘geek-biased’. That would explain the 15% Chrome adoption for example.
Tim
I totally agree with you on their users being not typical internet users. however those are the kind of numbers you are beginning to see emerge from other information sources. the point here is to use this data as a pointer and not as a perfect reflection of the data web.
Facebook, Firefox and Twitter are three apps that increasingly being used on the web — and even if these leading edge users are skewed, those three apps are still growing fast.
I think you have to treat this sample as an indicator, Om. While we’ve seen heavy growth on Chrome at Calliflower.com, it’s nowhere near 15%, and IE still accounts for a third of all the traffic.
Exactly. I was going to say the same thing. I love Wakoopa but it’s full of early adopters for for real statistics, I’d say divide this usage and cut 80% out of the 15% chrome adoption because I doubt they have more than 3% global market at this time.
Ahh yes I love firefox! Less virus, better interface!
yes indeed FireFox rock#$@#$%#$
Thank you Wakoopa for all this great data.
Epic self-selection bias. 50-60% Firefox vs 7-13% IE? I think not.
Agreed. It is very clearly not the same population as the population of Internet users. It is a mistake to consider this data representative of application usage in general, unless one is willing to ignore all other similar sets of data.
It could be interesting to see what their market, age, and language distributions are and then confirm their browser usage stats with another study of a similar population. But this alone isn’t worth much.
Agreed. But as I responded earlier, this is not a “perfect” reflection but more of an indicator of where things are heading. I am pretty sure if you follow the growth of FB, FF and Twitter, you can extend the data from “early adopters/geeks” to a broader adoption trend.
Feels good to see firefox wiping out IE. way to go!
Excellent point! This poll does seem like it would end up a little biased. IE would probably have a much stronger running if it wasn’t “geek-biased.”
Visits to my blog found that 60% of visitors were using Firefox versus 30% that were using IE. My blog, however, has a readership that is biased! I also do my fair share of promoting Firefox (ie., Firefox Friday)
Any reason why the Twhirl link in your post takes me to a Network Solutions’ ‘Under Construction’ page?
Should I be flattered or insulted not to be included in your demographic? Does the 50+ population exist on the web?
Hello, exactly. You have to download the plugin in order for the site to collect the stats. We can therefore assume that very few (if any) people over the age of 50 downloaded the plugin. This also tells is that the segment 41 to 50 is limited in numbers.
Of course it does, but the point I was making was about a certain demographic being skewed away from IE.
@Momz Wopperer: There was a 50+ slide included in the report. Ping me at bizdevATwakoopaDOTcom if you’re interested in that data.
Hello, I would be interested in the size of the segments measured in individuals. Providing percentages is only the tip of the iceberg and does not really help when you are making comparisons over segments of different sizes.
(yes, analytics and business intelligence is a part of my job) 😉
The 41-50 segment has IE at about 20% while Firefox got 56% of browser users.
The 50+ segment has Firefox usage at 62% and Internet at about 19%
This is a really interesting post. I am so glad that I came across this!
Om, hello, I too agree with the folks that are stating the the user base is invalid. Not only is 75K a too small a number these 75K are most probably young, tech savvy and interested to utilize web apps and the like. This fact will skew the results too much to be of any real value.
It would be interesting to see a weighting applied to the usage numbers based on the number of individual&ls in the sample segment. That would make the result for the 41 to 50 more interesting. I imagine that the 41 to 50 year old segment is much smaller than say the 21 to 30 segment. Therefore comparing apples with oranges.
Two other quick points if I may (1) There are no surprises in these results. I think if you asked 10 young(ish) web savvy folks to note down the top 10 apps they use every day the list would not be far from what is presented in the report and (2) I find it amazing that 75k of folks have downloaded what could be considered spyware on their computers just because the word ‘socal’ has been added onto the product description. That defies belief. Lets just hope some hacker does not find a way to hijack the plugin and turn it into a key logger.
Regards,
Jason
Jason…. to your questions I say check my previous responses.
The 41-50 segment has IE at about 20% while Firefox got 56% of browser users.
The 50+ segment has Firefox usage at 62% and Internet at about 19%
On the last paragraph about “spyware” well to that I say ouch!
Good comment by the way.
This article is extremely poor, Om, you’re usually much better than this. I’m not trying to pile on, but the point needs to be made again because you’re attempting to minimize the complaints by saying, “Oh, it might not be realistic sampling, but I’m going to treat it as such because it’s the leading edge and points to where the market is going.”
You really think that TextMate is now or ever will be the 10th most used app among all Mac users? Don’t know whether Wakoopa word of mouth mainly came from Twitter, TechCrunch, Digg, you or wherever, but it’s pretty clear that it’s currently the same herd we see over and over trying out the services mentioned there.
From the outset, you need to be qualifying all these stats are relevant *only for Wakoopa users*. I already see at least one article at Techmeme who just took your headline and ran with it with no caveats, as if this survey were representative of all computer users. Your site is great, Om, but c’mon.
Wakoopa does seem to be a pretty cool site, I can see the appeal of using it for kicks and giggles, but I’ll have to look more into it to see just how much is being tracked before I’ll consider installing it. If it knows which web apps that you’re using, than it must be looking not just that you’re using Chrome, but which URLs you’re visiting. I don’t want to someday log on to my account to see “Dude spent 14.2% of April looking at bewbs.”
I don’t know much about Wakoopa (shame on me for not checking into it before having opinions) but I do have to comment on part of what you said. If someone else runs with this story without mentioning the “finer” details, is that this author’s fault?
Perhaps using the stats from the one site, but also including similar stats from other places on the web would make a stronger statement. Maybe he could have used stats from timmyjohnboy.com! (j/k)
Another option would using another post title. Maybe “Facebook, Firefox, Twitter Lead App, Wakoopa User Usage”
These figures MUST be skewed by factors we must not/cannot know (hopefully). I’m aware of SO many folks who use IE just…because it’s there. Lots of corporate sites are locked in to IE, too.
Firefox? *Some* folks (but not all) “I’ve heard of it.”
Facebook? “Isn’t that the place where lechers hang out seducing teenage girls?”
Twitter? “Isn’t that where people type what time they’re going out to have coffee?”
The figures lack a certain real-world basis.
business????
Another survey from Neilsen says that 60% of twitter users are leaving the micro-blogging site after 1 month of its use. So don’t be surprised if twitter gets no place in the list if this survey was conducted some time later. Same number of people are adding on Twitter though.
I dislike firefox.
Being someone who develops websites, I dislike its way of working, its slight speed seems to be gained by ignoring vast sections of code and just doing what it feels like. Spending ages and ages trying to make a site loaded onto it look the same as on any of the other major browsers is a annoying and often futile act. Chrome is a much better choice for alternative browser in my opinion. So far, pages developed for it load as they should but with advanced speed. Maybe all the extra use is developers spending days trying to get things to load as they should.
The figures seem Strange, it lacks solitaire. And notpad
If the figures are created from usage, does that mean it is from new instances of programs? If that is so word proccesing applications and other programs that stay open for a long time such as world of warcraft shall provide lower percentages than ones such as web browsers, where it is constantly closed and opened for new windows.