Developer:Usage
From myExperiment
Site usage at July 2008
By Danius Michaelides, 5th August 2008
At the time of writing myExperiment.org has 1051 activated accounts.
The first figure shows the steady growth in the user base during 2008, with about 10-20 new users registering a week. Spikes in registrations are due to Taverna workshopws that use myExperiment to host their tutorial materials and also conferences where myExperiment is promoted, such as the conference of International Society for Computational Biology (weeks 30 and 31). However, we observe that a significant proportion of the activated accounts are discarded after registration (approximately 70% are used for less than an hour). This suggests that users are registering to discover more about the site and the content that is on there. 7% of use base consists of longer term users who have used the site for more than 6 months.
As far as content is concerned, myExperiment hosts 329 workflows and a further 132 workflows that are revised versions of those workflows. Workflows were downloaded a total of 50934 times, with 3 workflows commanding over a 1000 downloads each. Files are used much less by the user-base with only 109 uploads. However, 70% were added after the introduction of packs where users are making use of packs to associating documentation, example inputs and outputs and other files with workflows.
From a website perspective, since the beginning of 2008, the site recieved approximately 60000 page views in 13500 visits by 8581 unique visitors. The figures are collected using Google Analytics and do not include accesses made via the API (such as by Google Gadgets, Facebook apps or the Taverna plugin). Its interesting to note that the number of unique visitors is much larger than the number of registered users This suggests that the publically visible content on the site is of value to a wider audience. The social aspects of myExperiment such as user profiles, groups and also tagging maybe contribute to making the site more attractive to search engines and user queries. A more detailed analysis of how users find workflows can be found in Ref antoon's paper
280 (85%) of the workflows are publically visible and 252 (76%) are publically downloadable. For the workflows where the user has restricted access, 40% of the workflows are entirely private to the user and for the remaining the user has elected to share with individual users and groups.
36 workflows (over 10%) have been shared with the owner granting edit permissions to specific users and groups. In addition there are 53 instances where users have noted that a workflow is based on another workflow on the site. This indicates that the site is supporting collaboration amongst its users and that they are willing to contribute derived works.
36 workflows (over 10%) have been shared with the owner granting edit permissions to specific users and groups. In addition there are 53 instances where users have noted that a workflow is based on another workflow on the site. This indicates that the site is supporting collaboration amongst its users and that they are willing to contribute derived works.
