
Google’s Les Paul Doodle consumes record 5.3M hours, RescueTime estimates - webwright
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/googles-les-paul-doodle-consumes-record-53m-hours-rescuetime-estimates
======
enko
> that translates into a monetary value of more than $133 million, estimates
> RescueTime.

That number is as meaningless as the RIAA's claims of gargantuan losses from
piracy. It rests upon the completely unfounded assumption that time spent
playing with the "doodle" could and would have otherwise been spent doing
productive work. That's a nice wet dream for HR but doesn't line up anything
like reality from my experience.

~~~
ZoFreX
And also, numbers like this are completely useless without something to
compare them against. Like when company X announces they have cut their carbon
emissions by 10 billion tonnes... but the press release doesn't mention that
they are still outputting 300 trillion tonnes.

~~~
maukdaddy
But at least that number still has meaningful impact. Regardless of the total
percent of emissions, that's still 10 billion less into the environment. Much
bigger impact than the "lost productivity" numbers!

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a1k0n
I threw together a quick and very dirty decoder for the "tune" string in the
URL yesterday morning before I went to work.. I didn't really get a chance to
do anything with it as I was busy, but I intended to write a generator.
Anyway, here:

<http://pastebin.com/pNP3BWXy>

I wrote, but disown the above perl code. However, it does work, e.g.:

    
    
        $ perl decode.pl <chopsticks 
        chord: 0001100000 5-bit duration 0
        chord: 0001100000 5-bit duration 7
        chord: 0001100000 5-bit duration 6
        [etc etc]

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klochner
Anyone else wonder how well a random RescueTime user approximates the average
google user?

My mom uses google, would never use RescueTime, and almost surely didn't try
out the guitar.

Those projected numbers deserve a big fat asterisk.

~~~
jaxn
I also use RescueTime (because I want to be productive) and did not try out
the guitar (because I want to be productive).

Granted, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Is RescueTime a biased sample? Probably. The question to me is which way.

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mckoss
You can view the awesome presentation (in game-show format!) from the creators
of the Pac Man Doodle from Google I/O (Ryan Germick - Creative Lead for Google
Doodle, worked on both of these):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttavBa4giPc>

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magicseth
I'm cross posting because I was late to the discussion last time, but the
audio is stereo and is based on where on the string you strum. I found that a
nice little detail.

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jasonlgrimes
Thanks HN/YComb folks for reading. This was a fun piece to put together and
Joe Hruska our CEO did the heavy lifting working all night to put these
numbers together. Also thanks to our RescueTime users as they are the juice
that keeps our engine going!

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sosuke
Related to the guitar doodle but not to the article. It's driving me crazy,
people are recording their doodles and posting them on youtube! Why aren't
they posting to the link that just plays back their recording?

~~~
andrewpi
Apparently the recording feature only works in the United States.

~~~
savramescu
Yesterday it was only for US. I think they extended that service.

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lefstathiou
It's a little strange to me that 7.7 human lifetimes were spent playing around
with this little widget (assuming 78.7 yr lifespan).

~~~
melling
Looks like Google is on to something...

~~~
jodrellblank
Do they have a moral obligation to not show timewasting gadgets on their
homepage? If they showed something else, what good could 5M hours of
interaction do for the world?

~~~
Hawramani
In my opinion those who wasted their time on the gadget were people who
already had time to waste.

When I saw it what I did was pass my mouse over it, think it's neat, wonder
about the technology behind it for a second, then get back to work.

------
moondowner
Oh the other hand, at least 18,500 people learnt or were reminded of who Les
Paul is and what his contributions we're.

------
benologist
I really find it difficult to believe RescueTime's numbers, any number of
millions of hours requires a whole lot of people on the left and a whole lot
of minutes on the right - a big, big chunk of Google's enormous traffic would
not have cared, not have cared for more than seconds, or just not seen it at
all if they used their address or search bars instead of going to the home
page.

Although that's still going to easily be millions of people that _did_
interact a lot (probably most) wouldn't have found it very engaging... and
even if they all did 5.3m hours is a _lot_ of time for mere millions of people
to spend, we track ~10m people that only manage to clock ~2.5m hours daily
playing casual games.

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TheIronYuppie
Heh - is nothing sacred? not even how much time i blow off trying to play
stairway to heaven?

~~~
bfioca
I wrote this in a comment on our blog, but I'll copy it here too:

If you find yourself thinking, “Thank you, Buzz Killington,” let me just add
that the average time our most productive users spend on work related tasks
per day is 3 hours(!). So if you put in your 3-4 hours of productive time, go
nuts on that guitar doodle. We also show that if you work too many hours
straight in a row you’ll have a down week next week. But all of that is for a
future blog post.

Also, we were really careful to make sure no where in the blog post we claim
that it ate up productivity. Just that it consumed time from something else.
People must have guilty consciences. ;)

~~~
yuhong
Yea, I know: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639469>

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evanrmurphy
It's still consuming my time.

I don't think I can get "Chopsticks" any more polished than this:
<http://goo.gl/doodle/uAEhv>

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mkramlich
in other news: any really small number, when multipled by a really huge
number, yields a really large number!

~~~
netaddict
Unless the small number is less than 1!

~~~
Retric
Huge number * .999 is probably still a huge number. But they said Huge * small
= Large which suggests small is <1 but not tiny. AKA something like 1% to 10%

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mkramlich
I want to hear what Adrian Djangoholovaty did with it.

