Rock Your Firefox Update

February 4th, 2008

It’s been 4 months since my last Rock Your Firefox post, and since I’m all about stats updates lately, here’s the latest:

  • Over 7500 people have tried the application, with 4400 still using it and around 45 people interacting with it daily
  • Average of 13-15 application adds every day although occasional spikes up to 35 per day, and about the same number of removes every day, although most of the removes are from people that added some time ago
  • This chart shows the breakdown of how users found and added the application today.
  • There were 12 application adds this week from someone accepting an invitation to RYF sent by a friend
  • The application “About Page” has about 50 page views every day
  • Over 24,000 favorites added, 8000 of which were added using the automatic import feature

So, what amazing features are planned now? None! The app doesn’t have any major bugs and does its job well for the number of users it serves. I don’t think there’s a need for me to continue active development, which is why that actually stopped a number of months ago. Of course, the app is open source and part of AMO’s codebase, so patches are welcome.

There are a couple other reasons I’m not too excited about working on Facebook Platform stuff anymore.

For one, while it’s pretty easy to get started developing an application for Facebook Platform, it’s now almost a full-time job trying to keep an application up to date utilizing all of the latest bugfixes and improvements, something that only companies dedicated to Facebook App development can handle. There are changes and new features constantly announced in the Platform Status Feed, Developer News Blog, and weekly push SVN commit log. Developers might also find themselves spending time in the platform Bugzilla, forum, or wiki. There are so many sources of information to follow if you want to feel like you’re on top of things.

There was a time when I complained about the lack of all of these tools (mainly the open bug tracking system), so I suppose I should be happy they’re here. Rock Your Firefox has been fortunate in that it hasn’t been broken by any of the changes so far — at least not any of the intentional changes.

Another reason I think putting RYF into maintenance mode a few months ago was the right decision is that Facebook apps seem to have gone from cool and trendy to just annoying lately. When someone sends me an application invitation these days, I just feel bothered. Especially because I’m obsessive enough that I have to immediately get rid of it. I’m one of those people that clears their Gmail spam every time they notice the number. (Note: to anyone who plans on sending me a bunch of application invitations now, I have anticipated this and determined that it will not be funny. Now you don’t have to do it!)

This is a bit longer than it was supposed to be. I’ll probably post another RYF update in 6 months or so. If you haven’t tried out Rock Your Firefox, you can check it out here.

Categories: mozilla, planet.mozilla.org, rock your firefox | Tags: , , , | Comment (1)

Rock Your Firefox 0.4 Launched

September 5th, 2007

The latest version of Rock Your Firefox, Mozilla’s Facebook application, went live this morning. There are two exciting new features in it:

Automatic Add-on Detection

When adding the application, users will now have the option to detect the add-ons they already have installed in Firefox and add them as favorites. Existing users can do this from the sidebar of the homepage. Anytime new add-ons are installed, you can re-scan to detect the changes.

New Homepage with Newsfeed

Instead of going directly to the Browse area when using the application, there is now a homepage with a list of recent add-on activity such as new versions of your favorite add-ons, favorite additions by your friends, and recommendations based on your friends’ favorites. The sidebar has several sections, some of which will not always be visible.

Check out version 0.4 at rockyourfirefox.com! The next release is planned for the end of September.

Categories: mozilla, planet.mozilla.org, rock your firefox | Tags: , , | Comment (1)

Upcoming Facebook Platform Changes

August 27th, 2007

Tonight, Facebook announced some upcoming changes to their platform. I wanted to comment about how they will affect Rock Your Firefox.

  • Profile box visibility changes - This affected our default text shown before a user adds any favorites, but has already been fixed. Developers were previously told they had 10 days to adjust this, however that deadline has now been extended.
  • Application Directory metrics shift to user engagement - I imagine this could only be better for us, as our statistics show that most of our users check back with the application every day. [Aside: We have fought with a similar problem on AMO of gaging popularity of add-ons based on raw download counts: People try to game the system to get into the top 5, which then gets them in for a long time as people will download anything in the top 5 without much consideration and then uninstall it. We will have new statistics to gage this by soon, including active user counts and "favorite" counts from both Facebook and AMO, which provide a much better idea of which add-ons people actually use and like.]
  • Requests/Invitations deprecation - Rock Your Firefox does not allow users to send invitations to other users. A large part of that is because I expected this to happen. Application invitations are too spammy, and I didn’t think they would last long, especially with some applications abusing them by sending when the user didn’t even select friends to invite. Facebook stated that a standard tool for this will be offered, which is exciting, as we get the functionality but not the wasted time on development of the soon-to-be-deprecated system.
  • No more e-mail notifications - Does not affect Rock Your Firefox.
  • Newsfeed stories for everyone - As an application developer, this is very exciting. Currently, newsfeed stories generated by applications are only seen by friends that also have the application added. The only newsfeed story that has a chance of attracting new users is the generic “Foxkeh has added the Rock Your Firefox application.” If all stories have a chance of being seen, we can generate a lot more interest from users that don’t know about add-ons or don’t even know about Firefox. As a Facebook user, I really hope they have good controls so that if I don’t want to constantly see someone superfeeding their pet gift that grows into a map of places you’ve been, I don’t have to.
  • Join Facebook with an application already added - Earlier this month, Facebook posted that they are working on a feature to allow users to sign up and immediately start using an application. As we have been promoting the rockyourfirefox.com URL and I suspect that several community members joined Facebook just to see the application, this will be helpful.

Overall, these changes are great for us, but I’m sure they are quite unfortunate for other applications that use functionality that will now be removed. Rock Your Firefox 0.4 is scheduled to release this Friday with two awesome new features, which I’ll blog about once they’re live.

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A Comparison

August 26th, 2007

I was reading a post about it being Facebook Platform’s 3 month anniversary and decided to do a little comparison.

  Firefox Add-ons Facebook Platform
User base 75-100 million[1] 30 million[2]
New Downloads/Users per day 500,000[3] 100,000+[4]
Age 5 years 3 months
Available Locales 40+ 1
Open Source Yes Not on purpose
Extensibility Complete Restricted
API Stability Stable within major releases Constantly changing, often with little warning
Community Gatherings Developer Days Developer Garages
Corporate Involvement Yes (AllPeers, StumbleUpon, etc) Yes (Slide, RockYou, etc)
Number of add-ons/applications in directory 2500 public; 1300 sandbox* 3300[5]
Number of developers 3175* Unknown
Add-ons/applications with over 1 million active users 40+* 46[6]
Google News articles in the last month 55 501
Bug reporting Completely open Completely internal
Overlap Rock Your Firefox Facebook Toolbar

* Only considers add-ons hosted on addons.mozilla.org; there are many add-ons hosted by their individual developers not taken into account.

I’m not one to get into the politics of whether Facebook Platform is good for the web. I’m more interested in what we can do to have people as excited about Firefox add-ons as they are about getting that one person who always takes forever in Scrabulous to finally go.

What can we learn from Facebook Platform? Why do people so readily add applications?

  • Applications are restricted. People know exactly what an application is allowed to do within Facebook because you see a list of checkboxes when you add it. It can’t cause data loss. It can’t modify your information. Extensions can do anything they want. They can cause data loss. They can do bad things to your computer. I think that Firefox users who have never tried extensions are either: a) confused about what extensions are, or b) concerned about their security
  • Applications are required to view content. If someone sends you something in an application, you often have to add that application to see it. In Firefox, we call those plug-ins. I can’t think of any extensions that you have to add in order to see content you find scattered around the web.
  • You know when friends add applications. People add applications when they see something cool that a friend added. With Firefox add-ons, you don’t know what add-ons your friends use unless you use their browser or they talk about their extensions. (Although many of my friends talk about what extensions they use, I think it is fair to say this is not the norm.) This is what Rock Your Firefox tries to solve: seeing what add-ons your friends use and improving discoverability.

Having said that, I’m not saying that we should make any changes to be more like Facebook. I certainly think that extensions’ ability to modify anything is key to the innovation that we see all the time in new extensions. I think we need to find out what facets of the Firefox ecosystem are the most compelling and make people realize that everything that’s being done on Facebook could be done even better in the open web.

(Obligatory disclaimer: The above opinions are my own and are not affiliated with any entity in which I may be involved.)

Categories: add-ons, amo, mozilla, planet.mozilla.org, rock your firefox | Tags: , , , , , | Comments (6)