Firefox on Facebook Walls
Last week, Facebook launched a new tool called Lexicon that measures the number of times a term is mentioned on user, event, and group walls. This is what the results look like for Firefox:
That huge spike at the beginning of April is when Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released. The gaps in the graph are when the term wasn’t mentioned enough to be recorded. Comparing the results of other browsers isn’t too helpful as Safari and Opera are common nouns, and most people would abbreviate Internet Explorer as IE.
Although no actual numbers are given, it’s still cool to be able to visualize a part of the biggest way Firefox is adopted around the world: telling your friends about it.
Categories: mozilla, planet.mozilla.org | Tags: facebook, firefox, mozilla | Comment (1)Facebook’s First Sponsored Gift
As I was about to go to bed, I refreshed my Facebook newsfeed/homepage and happened to catch that today’s gift is free. What?! They finally caved in and made gifts free? No. They’ve allowed their first commercial “gift” to penetrate the cheerful bunch of furry creatures, birthday wishes, and pop culture references, and even make it very clear why the gift is free: “The Skittles Gum gift is FREE to promote Skittles New Gum.”
While I’m sure it was quite expensive for this deal to take place, I guess we can expect similar items in the future. It will go nicely with the 2 sponsored polls in the last week I’ve had take up significant real estate in my newsfeed asking whether I would like to purchase a book on how to seduce women. (I’m guessing they are using polls to advertise because they can specify target audiences, unlike with flyers. Plus, people actually have to notice the polls.)
While advertisements creeping into Facebook’s core features is nothing new, as best I can tell at this late hour, this will be the first time they’ve allowed it to appear in users’ profile pages. (Obviously not including applications.) I hope next month they’ll introduce sponsored applications that are automatically added when you join Facebook, or better yet, interstitial ads.
Categories: planet.mozilla.org | Tags: facebook | Comment (1)A Comparison
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: add-ons, amo, facebook, facebook platform, mozilla, stats | Comments (6)Facebook Basketball Bracket
At the time of this post, my Facebook NCAA basketball bracket standing is:
- Globally: #2052
- My friends: #1
- LSU: #7 (of 43,149 people (I’m actually tied for third place but they count strangely))
- Baton Rouge, LA: #1 (of 17,334 people)
I got the Final Four all correct, so hopefully UCLA and Georgetown will make it to the championship and I’ll be even more correct. Pretty good for not knowing anything about basketball.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: facebook | No CommentsFacebook Redesign
Facebook’s Sneak Preview Group has some screenshots of the upcoming redesign. I’ve always been a fan of Facebook’s design; I think it is done very well. It’s one of the main reasons I favor it greatly over MySpace. I was a bit skeptical of this change at first, but I think this new design looks pretty cool. It’s very web 2.0, or something like that.
In other news, Firefox 2.0.0.3 was released tonight. Help -> Check for Updates if you can’t wait!
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: facebook, firefox | No Comments