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Haha, that’s great. The guys at reddit have fun with their graphs sometimes, too. http://blog.reddit.com/2010/03/and-fun-weekend-was-had-by-all.html

You can see Thanksgiving and the three summer holidays in there, too.

Looks like the picture is backwards.

If you look closely at the dates at the top, they are backwards.

Also, is anyone really surprised that most people (not companies) use Basecamp just for the To-Do list and nothing else.

Seems like the week between Christmas and New Years would be the right time to do any hardware swaps.

Given that I can’t be the only one who does his shopping organization (and my published wish list) in backpack, I wonder if there is a bump before this on that side.

I would be more interested in the “downward” trend of this chart? I know the dates are written backwards, but not their order…

@Dave – The graph is upside down. The peaks you see represent dips. They turned it upside down to make fun Christmas trees out of it.

So, the overall trend is up, not down.

-dhc -

What’s the vertical axis represent?

@Dave – More specific to Donnie’s follow-up, they only flipped it vertically as opposed to rotating it 180.

tl;dr The graph is upside down and during Christmas the usage of Basecamp drops significantly. Also, the use during the rest of the year is predictable

Tufte would be proud of this graph.

@Phelps : I thing that they should be extra cautious about this, because in many organizations, the end of the year is a crucial time with a ton of work to be done (projects to be finished before the 31 for accountancy reasons, essential administrative work, or even some activities that are specifically done in that time of the year, like implementing some changes in a system due to legal modifications occurring on January 1st…). Therefore, even if there are less people who are working on that time of the year, for quite a lot of those who are, any disruption in the systems they are using can potentially be a real disaster. Not to mention the fact that it’s generally a time of the year where there are only a handful of people working in these organizations, so they are even more vulnerable to the consequences of such a disruption if – for example – the people who are capable of extracting data from the last Basecamp backup are not there…

So, it may be a time to do maintenance operations that may reduce the capacity of the servers for example, but it’s clearly the worst time of the year for a maintenance that would completely close the access to the system, even for a handful of hours…

@Anonymous Coward : I don’t think Tufte would like this graph at all… More precisely, it’s quite close to a duck…

@Deltaplan: I see now that my irony was too sublime (no criticism of you, it’s not obvious at all that I meant it that way). I agree completely, its useless for all but the “fun” of the christmas trees.

I would also note the dip around Thanksgiving as well. It makes me feel good to know people take a noticeable time off from work.

Funny, the trend was the exact opposite for me.