As readers of my blog posts know, Socorro is Mozilla’s crash reporting system. All of the code for Socorro (the crash catcher) and Breakpad (the client side) is open source and available on Google Code.

Some other companies are starting to use Socorro to process crashes. In particular, we are seeing adoption in the gaming and music sectors – people who ship connected client software.

One of these companies is Valve Software, the makers of Half Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal, among other awesome games. Recently Elan Ruskin, a game developer at Valve, gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference about Valve’s use of crash analysis. His slides are up on his blog and are well worth a read.

If you’re thinking about trying Socorro, I’d encourage you to join the general discussion mailing list (or you can follow it on Google Groups). It’s very low traffic at present but I anticipate that it will grow as more people join.

Later in the year, we plan on hosting the first inaugural Crash Summit at Mozilla, where we’ll talk about tools, crash analysis, and the future of crash reporting. Email me if you’re interested in attending (laura at mozilla) or would like to present. The event will be open to Mozillians and others. I’ll post updates on this blog as we develop the event.