I'm curious. You guys must be sitting on a ton of data and there are things I (and probably others here) would like to know about.

For example:

1. how many characters and words do the top percentile of users know? Maybe you could track some of these people down and interview them for the newsletter or something.

2. how much time do they spend on skritter?

3. what times of the day do most people seem to be on?

4. how long are sessions on skritter for different people? does this seem to be correlating with proficiency? does it correlate with how long they've been users?

This stuff would be interesting to know about. I think the more of this kind of stuff there is, the more fun Skritter gets

As interesting as it would all be it's not really relevant. First because every person has their own unique way of learning, second because we don't know how much work everyone is doing offline. Personally I spend about 30-40 minutes on Skritter a day BUT I spend sooo much time offline practicing. So if my retention rate seems high it's because of all the offline work I do, or if it seems low that's just because I'm a slow learner.

I would worry that if such numbers (from question 2-3) were posted there would be some people who would feel discouraged as to their own learning rate.

I'd love to read an interview from the top percentile of users though and I'd be willing to bet they do lots of off Skritter study. :)

This type of request comes up from time to time. I would really like to see this kind of data, but they are so busy that who knows when we will finally get to see them implement the idea.

I think it would be better placed in the forums. Some biographical info in a clickable link from everyone's avatar might include stats like # words known, time spent, reason for learning, or maybe just a snapshot of that user's current stats page. A private message system allowing users might be able to practice messages between themselves privately would be nice, too. Part of the fun of learning the language is using it. I don't know that I'd really care much about a "leaderboard" type page, though.

George is wanting to write a blog post using some data that a user analyzed for us, but he is waiting on me to download an updated copy of the data for analysis.

User profiles would be a good place for some of the personal stats, yeah. We have interviewed a couple power users for the newsletter--I know shinyspoons is in the top percentile for characters learned, but I'm not sure who else is actually on top, really. There are a lot of insanely dedicated Skritterers! I know of a bunch that are above 3500 character, and some have maybe twice as many words. The record for most hours in a day is around 11, with 44 in a week. I don't know who has studied the most hours total, but it's at least 677 hours.

Studying is spread out pretty well--Skritter users are so international that there don't seem to be any times that are more than twice as hot as any others.

Session length--I have no idea. The longer, the more proficiency. The more regular, the more efficient. Those are my guesses.

Looking forward to that blog post!

I suspect proficiency has a stronger correlation with frequency and regularity of sessions than with length, but we'll just have to see what picture the data paints for us.