Google’s Les Paul Doodle consumes record 5.3M hours, RescueTime estimates | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Les Paul Doodle consumes record 5.3M hours, RescueTime estimates

geekwire.com

82 pointswebwright29 comments

> 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.

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.

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!

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]

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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?

Apparently the recording feature only works in the United States.

No, it works outside the US as well. I can vouch for that.

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

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).

Looks like Google is on to something...

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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. ;)

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

Dude. No Stairway.

What... no love for Wayne's World? Tough crowd!

It's still consuming my time.

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

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

Unless the small number is less than 1!

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%

I want to hear what Adrian Djangoholovaty did with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com