Initial results

So data has been pouring in for the last few days and here's the deal. Here's a screenshot of the data:

Total visits recorded: 441
Number of participants: 11
Average visit length: 3.64 page views
Domains visited by participants:

• espn.go.com
• facebook.com
• huffingtonpost.com
• hulu.com
• news.ycombinator.com
• nytimes.com
• reddit.com
• techcrunch.com
• twitter.com
• youtube.com

Graph of domain visits:

Graph of participants:

Page views per visit distribution:

There isn't enough data yet to draw certain correlations that I will want to eventually. However looking at the data thus far is promising. We can make some judgments:

• People are using the plugin: there are 11 participants who have logged 441 total visits in just 2 days, so with a week more of data there should be plenty of data.
• The majority of visits are to Facebook, which makes sense considering their traffic. I want to see how this bears out over a larger population, but if we can determine that Facebook is indeed one of the top productivity killers, then future efforts can better focus how to curb procrastination on just that site.
• The average visit length is just over 3 page views, which seems very short to me. Going further, the median visit length is 2, with the majority being either 1 or 2 page views. I would have expected more, but perhaps this could be a sign that the plugin is working since it induces a delay on every page load.

Privacy issues solved. DOWNLOAD IT NOW!

So the plugin is good to go. Download it here: http://stanford.edu/~rparikh/cgi-bin/delaybot/delaybot.zip

What I've changed is that it no longer logs the whole url, just the source website so that way you don't have to fear me snooping about the specific urls you visit, just the domain. Also, it no longer logs the actual IP address, just a hash of the IP so that I can disambiguate users.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Download the plugin here: http://stanford.edu/~rparikh/cgi-bin/delaybot/delaybot.zip
2. Double-click the zip archive to open it up
3. Open Google Chrome
4. Go to "Window > Extensions"
5. Click the + icon next to the label that says "developer mode" if it is not already open
6. Click "load unpacked extension"and it will bring up a file select dialog
7. Navigate to the "delaybot" folder that came out of the downloaded zip archive
8. Click "select" to choose that folder
9. Make sure you enable the plugin in chrome
10. That's it!

I would really appreciate it if you wanted to download the extension and help me out! Please ask me any questions or concerns you have.

More updates

So I've finally set up my extension to log all user activity to an external log file. My log file is here: http://stanford.edu/~rparikh/cgi-bin/delaybot/log.txt

Essentially I'm logging user actions as comma-separated values. The fields I'm logging are:

datetime, delay length (ms), url, tabid, action, ip address

To explain further...delay length is the delay length in milliseconds that my extension has induced on that particular page load, url is the url they visited, tabid is Chrome's assigned tab id, and action is whether the user was opening or closing the tab.

My extension is available for download here: http://stanford.edu/~rparikh/cgi-bin/delaybot/delaybot.zip

I haven't put it up on the extension store because I want to control the distribution for now. Right now I'm just going to offer it to friends and people in the class, and track usage for a few days to make sure that nothing fishy is happening and then distribute it more widely.

Updates

I've modified my browser extension so that it records every time a user visits a site on The List™, and sends this back to a server which I haven't set up yet (I've just been testing locally for now). The only thing that's missing right now is the ability to detect when a user uninstalls the extension, but I'll get that figured out in the next couple days. Over the weekend I will set up a server, and use the extension on myself and a couple friends to make sure that everything's working alright. Then, I plan to distribute the plugin to a wider audience early next week, in time to get lots of results over the next few weeks, and leave myself enough time to modify the study on the fly if my early results necessitate this.

So yeah, not much new this time around. But things will be going down soon enough.