Parent comment is FUDish, definitely, but he has a few points. If the stated aim is popularity measurement, asking for those other things is disingenuous. Want

Parent comment is FUDish, definitely, but he has a few points. If the stated aim is popularity measurement, asking for those other things is disingenuous. Want to identify trends? That's ok, but say that's what you're doing. Secondly, it really is a lot of effort for probably not a lot of great results. Mostly it will suffer from extreme self-selection bias. Further, the site says that "the stats on RubyGems.org...are a weak indicator of gem popularity amongst Rails apps"—that might be true, or it might not be. Regardless, it's some sort of indicator. But beyond that, most of the gems people use are open source: demonstrably good popularity indicators already exist in the form of Github watchers, forks, commits, commit activity, issue reporting, mailing list throughput, etc.