This is what I do when I’m waiting for emails to roll in - click image for larger version.
It seems like lately everywhere I look, someone is talking about their great muxtape. If you’re not familiar, muxtape is a site that lets you upload 12 mp3s at a time, a la the classic, tradeable “mixtape.” Others can listen to your set and buy the individual tracks off amazon if they like it. All in all, a pretty cool system and a great way to get non-crap music streaming at work. BUT - Exactly how pervasive is this new, hipster hit?
As I was browsing for playlists that struck my fancy, it seemed like the same users were popping up over and over again. I decided that either (1) they have some sneaky weighting algorithm that places some users on the front page more often or (2) there’s just not that many people with active accounts yet. Since Ariel Waldman’s username popped up within my first three refreshes, I was leaning towards the former.
Enter Excel and some serious geeking out.
By copy/pasting and refreshing the users a few times, I pulled a few trials of 1000 users at a time and did a little analysis on the results. (Don’t worry about my sanity - this only took about 30 minutes of office downtime.) Well surprise, surprise, it looks like BOTH are true!
Although I didn’t do a HUGE sample set as my time involved matched my level of caring here, I still didn’t expect to see some users show up over 13 times. In fact, some showed up 23 times! For those of you keeping track at home, that’s well beyond the eighth standard deviation (in otherwords, HIGHLY unlikely to occur as a random event). Upon inspection though, I didn’t actually recognize any of those most recurrent names (except for gawker), so maybe it really is just due to small sample size. After all, Ariel Waldman didn’t show up once in 15,000 names. :P
As for user base size, the multiple trials of decreasing uniqueness create the two asymptotes in the graph above. I added a line of best fit which happens to be a parabola, but no mind as its tangent still approximates the limit. In other words, as of this writing they probably have somewhere around 7,500 users, give or take a few hundred (err on the higher side). Thats a pretty small group of people, but as usual, the first adopters are the noisiest on the net, so they’re squaking hard about this one. I, for one, love the idea. In fact, why not listen to my muxtape riiiiiight…. now?
Any statisticians in the crowd want to comment?