i've definitely been thinking about that as well. i'm a big fan of seeing statistics about information travelling through the network (hence the columns added to the library/upload tables). unfortunately, some extra statistics like "number of requests from X ip, from X client, etc etc etc..." just aren't possible to do in the table format.

as far as seeing which files are popular, you can do that right now in the 'library' view -- it'll show how many queries matched your files, how many files were attempted to be uploaded, how many were actually uploaded, and how many other places in the network [that you know of] that have the exact same file.

for other types of statistics (like message routing) you can view the statistics window from one of the drop down menus (i forget which exactly).

there's been some behind-the-scenes CVS changes to statistics in anticipation of a better searching scheme, which hopefully we'll be seeing soon.

in the future, after i finish up reworking some of this gui display stuff, i'd like to add some extensive logging support, to make more sense out of the info travelling back and forth in the network. (it all stems from my interest in making intelligence out of information.)

btw, i had an idea the other day and i'm wondering if people would be interested -- you know how you can display visualizations in winamp?... what about being able to 'view' the gnutella network. not like previously done, where you can see which nodes are connected, in the really literal sense... but some sort of thing that finds patterns and makes non-literal translations of the patterns to the screen. this would go somewhat hand-in-hand with logging, because it'd require the basic same infrastructure (recieving & translating information), but it'd be displayed in a very different way.

anyways.. those are just ideas.

sam