We actually don't collect that information for privacy reasons.

The only thing we *do* have is the number of channels that the widget is added to, as a natural side-effect of the way the system works, but that doesn't tell you if anyone's actually using those channels.

Because of the cache, we don't know how many times a widget is actually run, only how many times it's fetched from our servers, which would be probably be an order of magnitude too low if the cache is doing its job properly.

We don't currently collect *any* information about what users are clicking on, what music they're playing, or even what mode it's in - in general we resist collecting fine-grain user behavior from the device because, frankly, it's a bit creepy.

This might seem pretty strange - but we're interested mainly in overall, aggregate behaviors, keeping information about individual users as anonymous as possible.  Information about individuals exists only the degree that it takes to operate the service, or diagnose problems.  We may change this in the future, but for the time being, privacy trumps collection of personal use data.  As a side-effect, this means we naturally comply with some of the more draconian data privacy rules in various countries.

What we encourage folks to do that care about this is to instrument their own widgets to collect the information they want and send it to their own servers.  While not required, we'd also encourage disclosure of the information being collected so that users can make an informed choice.

You're certainly welcome to share your thoughts on these issues - I hope I didn't come off as sounding like I thought these were bad ideas.  I tend to be a bit more direct than most people expect someone in my position to be.

In general, the system will remain open, and certainly so for chumby-branded devices.

However, some of the partners have the option, which we expect many of them to exercise at least at first, to either whitelist or blacklist the widget catalog for their particular device.  That means that it's possible for some of the widgets to not be available for all devices.  The reasons they may choose to not show widgets could vary - either they don't perform well on the hardware, require resources that the device may not have, or perhaps they don't think the content of the widget is appropriate for their users.  Overall, however, we hope that these partners see the value in the openness of the system to third-party developers - and I think the more devices that support the platform, the more likely that's going to happen, since a device that's more open will naturally be of more value than one that isn't, all else being equal.