You have lies, damned lies and you have statistics like daily website usage statistics. I sometimes try to use these statistics to measure whether or not people are actually interested in this tinymail thingy.
In the graph you often see peeks. Especially in the blue and green colored bars which represents things like the hits and the amount of requested files on the web server. These peeks, not surprisingly, happen each time after I blog about tinymail.
More interesting are the visits (yellow and orange). Obviously the amount of visits peek a little bit the same day the blue and green bars peek. The good news is that the amount of visits stays relatively high a few days after the blog, whereas the amount of hits don’t. You can see this the 6th day of September and the 4th day. Same happened the 29th day of September.
Interesting is also that the amount of sites (unique IP addresse) are not very different from the amount of visits. Does this mean that companies do a lot visiting, whereas people do a lot hits? It’s a vague statistic indeed.
Maybe it’s just me interpreting the results the way I want them to be (the typical psychological mistake most people make when looking at statistical data). I believe it’s important to keep this psychology in mind. It’s the first full month that I measured this, I will of course measure it more often and try to identify both true trends and my psyche-mistakes.
I’ve been surprised by the interest in the project. I hope this will soon translate to project members, contributors and contributions. Chances are high there’s going to be very interesting announcements in future. Chances are equally high there wont be such announcements. A lot depends on how much competent people will invest time in the project. A lot depends, they told me, on my own availability and willingness to partly invest my own career in the project. If more people join the project, pressure on me will be less but interest in the project will be more.
A lot people told me that the future is web E-mail. For desktop, yes probably. Or maybe? I’m not even certain. For all mobile devices and embedded appliances, I’m less certain about that. I will also steer tinymail to be a framework for web E-mail application development. Not everybody will be using G-, Hot- and Xmail if E-mail will or would always be accessed using HTML. A lot companies might be interested in having their own E-mail appliance in their own company rack. Maybe E-mail services on devices like wifi routers? A lot companies hate having to deal with setting up both E-mail servers and clients like outlook.
A lot of today’s HTML E-mail services and websites suck on most, if not all, mobile devices. A trend or an unavoidable fact for mobiles? Is everything to become a website? Or is that just silly Web 2.0 marketing activity?
Too much people, including me on occasion, think black/white: they like their GMail thing and now think it’s simply impossible that there are other possibilities for E-mail, other then their own focus-idea about it.
I say, let us get some software built on top of tinymail. A lot people are waiting for Modest. Modest will happen. But I’m also interested in other users and cases. The API is going to be like this. That is a certainty. Yes, things are still going to change. But not as drastic as the last few months. It’s more or less becoming what I wanted it to be. Change is good, it means that you can request it when building your software with it.
But tinymail is designed with this change in mind. It’s flexible and adaptive. This means that change doesn’t necessarily mean API change. It means extending. Adding. Keeping it adaptive and flexible is what required the massive refactoring of the last months. Next time this happens, the major version number will flip and a new API directory and branch will be made. My plan is to guard API and ABI per major version.