Lately there has been a thread on seesmic about numbers in and around seesmic. There is also seesmic café episode 85 which presents additional numbers. I had some fun using the seesmic API and providing even more numbers.

Looking at about 40.000 of the latest videos posted on seesmic (during about a month):

English is the seesmic language

All in all ten different languages have been used. Not specified are all those videos from YouTube or qik. English dominates with 78%. This won’t come as a real surprise. Also not French being on the second place with 16%, because of the origin of the seesmic founders. Spanish is on the third place with under 1.5%. So far I think the order matches the overall distribution of spoken languages. Now let’s have a closer look at the remaining languages below 1%.

72 out of 40000 (0.18%) had been recorded in german followed by 43 italian, 31 japanese, 15 dutch, 13 chinese, 4 russian and 3 korean.

Thursday is the seesmic day

People don’t seem to like mondays.

Freida is the top seesmic user

The 40000 videos were posted by 1280 different users. Freida was the single user that posted the most videos, namely 1562. That are about 3-4 videos per hour constantly over a period of a month (assuming 8 hours of sleep per day).

Now how hard was it to get those numbers. It was very straight forward to have some implementation in Smalltalk to use the seesmic API. As an example the following snippet fetches information about the latest 50 videos on seesmic:

| session videos languages |
session := SMICSession username: ‘user’ password: ‘pwd’.
videos := session videolistMax: 50.


Doing the statistics is also very easy in Smalltalk:

"include above code here"
languages := Bag new.
videos do: [:video | languages add: video language].
Transcript show: languages sortedCounts.


Now instead of just showing the numbers of language distribution on the Transcript it is also easy to generate a URL that uses the Google graph API and produces above nice graphs.