Abstract
Online Internet of Things (IoT) communities allow IoT engineers to publish information about their projects to a wider audience of users. Despite the growing adoption of IoT technologies in business, the popularity of IoT projects remains unexplored. Understanding how to improve the popularity of IoT projects helps project owners attract more users and foster business opportunities. In this paper, we explore the important characteristics of popular IoT projects across three facets:
views
count,
respects
count, and
trending
scores. We study over 18,000 IoT projects hosted on Hackster.io—a large online IoT community. In particular, we perform a time-series clustering to identify the evolution of each of the three popularity facets. In addition, we construct linear mixed-effect models to investigate the most important factors associated with the popularity of IoT projects. We provide insights to online IoT communities to improve the user guidelines to help (new) IoT engineers make their projects more eye-catching.