Have you ever looked at a long list of software packages available for installation and wondered which ones people actually use? GNOME developers are working on new ways to find and browse applications that take usage statistics into account. You can help out with the effort by sharing your application usage statistics.
Right now, we're just providing global anonymous statistics about the applications that are most frequently used by users of the GNOME Online Desktop. In the future, we may extend this with other features like seeing which applications are most frequently used among your circle of friends or finding local people who use a particular application.
When application usage statistics are enabled for your account, the Online Desktop software keeps track of which applications you interact with. Periodically it uploads a list of applications that you've used within the last day to the server. We don't record anything about what you're doing inside the applications, what documents you have open, or even how much time you spend inside each application.