Wakoopa: Useless Tracker Tool?
At the beginning of this month we made an announcement of the release of Wakoopa - a tracker tool for applications.
Review of Wakoopa
Rated as /5 on May 23 2007 by Cristiano Betta
Much like Last.fm, Wakoopa has users install a tracker to monitor the behavior of the user. Where Last.fm focuses on music, Wakoopa tracks your use of applications. I have been using the tool for a while and I think that it might be one of the most useless trackers yet for a whole bunch of reasons.
1) Yes it is nice to see what others are using, but somehow there is a big difference between an application and a piece of music. Music involves passion, taste, and feeling while the most PC users use applications because they were either forced into that situation or because they have never looked beyond what was pre-installed on their PC. I have to admit that Wakoopa has the potential of solving that last issue.2) So maybe Wakoopa is nice for discovering new applications? I went to the Software page to see what others are using and what is recommended to me by Wakoopa. To summarize the statistics page the following can be concluded:
The most common applications are browsers, in the following order: Firefox (?!?), Internet Explorer, Firefox (Again?!), Opera and Safari.- As a Mac user I am recommended the most common other Mac applications: iLife, iWork, etc. A bit too obvious I believe.
- The second most interesting thing besides browsing is chatting using the MSN client.
3) So, I have some friends on Wakoopa with the same (forced) taste in applications, and I can see what other applications they use, and I might want to try these out. But will this make me happy? I don’t think there is any really interesting reason to go to the Wakoopa site and start trying out applications. Most of them will probably not be the most popular applications as I am already using these, which means that they are unlikely to really make me happy. Furthermore I believe that if an application can be really useful, I would probably feel sad for being so stupid before.
4) My final complaint is not that much a practical problem, but more a theoretical one: what is the Wakoopa business model? As there isn’t much reason to stay with Wakoopa, and as they don’t offer much extra (unlike Last.fm who offer a music station with your music) I am thinking how they get any income. Are they selling the information about the software I use? Is anyone ever going to sue them for their information as they keep record of all the illegal installations of Microsoft Office and other software? I think the privacy factor, though surely anticipated by the creators, is a bigger con than there are pros.
In short I think Wakoopa is fairly useless, and creates a bigger privacy issue than it offers new features. Maybe they are planning more but for now I am inclined to uninstall their tracker.
alper http://www.alper.nl
May 23rd, 2007I think the commenting functionality launched today can prove a valuable addition.
That could enable some serious conversation about applications between the actual users of those applications.
But to enable that, I don’t know if a tracker is absolutely necessary. A functionality so you can designate favorites could work just as well.
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
May 24th, 2007In the end, I think they don’t offer much difference yet between them and for example http://osx.iusethis.com
Robert http://robertgaal.myopenid.com/
May 24th, 2007Hi Christiano,
Thanks for your comments! Here are mine:
1) Software isn’t as sexy as music to a lot of people, but to other people it is! That’s our target audience: gamers and the tech crowd. I consider myself pretty passionate about software and games, and so are a lot of others.
2) Have you signed up and checked your dashboard? Theres a whole lot of discovering to be done at that spot. Recommendations, a list of what your friends are using, version updates, etc. It’s not perfect yet, but we are hoping on getting there!
3) This depends on what kind of person you are I guess. I couldn’t be happier to find the right tool for the right job, making me more effective behind my desktop.
4) Our businessmodel is advertising, and packaging all public (!) information for software developers to see. If your worried about privacy, so are we! Check out our privacy page to see what we’ve done about it: http://wakoopa.com/about/privacy If you’re not comfortable about sharing your usage, just put your profile on private in the settings panel
Iusethis is a great platform, but it’s not quite the same when you look at it. Social news or social network: there is a difference. Also: filling in what you use by hand can be a bit tiresome sometimes, but hey, different concepts.
I absolutely get what you’re saying! Our software isn’t interesting for everybody, and the information you see is not yet perfected. This is something we’re working on at this very moment. So thanks, we’ll consider these points when we’re building the next version
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
May 24th, 2007Hi Robert,
Thank you for attending my criticism personally. Trust me, I am part of the tech crowd and I like going around and finding new tools. So don’t make me look like some non-tech guy who is just simply not interested in new apps.
I spend a lot of time looking for new apps, and I have been looking at iusethis for a while and I agree that Wakoopa does a better job than them in automatically tracking.
My problem with Wakoopa is that it is to general. It show me apps that I either have tried once and discarded, or it shows me particularly general advice. Furthermore the new versions option is nice, but I already have a tool like that, and I really really don’t want to be updating most of these open source apps every time that they release a .1 upgrade. Just aint worth the trouble.
Thank you for clearing the privacy issue though, I think you miht have gotten my comment more often?
Have you ever thought about actually tracking what WebApps people are using? With the shift of normal apps to webapps we can conclude that the most popular apps are browsers, but what apps are people using IN their browser?
Robert http://robertgaal.myopenid.com/
May 24th, 2007Hi Christiano,
I don’t quite know your background, so I’m sorry if I may have sounded a bit condescending.
We have gotten the privacy questions sometimes, so it’s something that our users worry about. Explaining how we work is a big part of what we do, absolutely.
About webapps: we consider the web as big a platform as Mac or Windows. I myself use bloglines, gmail, flickr, twitter, etc. on a daily basis. We’re already working on a browser plugin that would track only certain apps actually. It’s something we’ve wanted even before Wakoopa had a name actually