Rock Your Firefox was a Facebook application we built two years ago to add a fun, social aspect to Firefox customization. As your friends selected their favorite add-ons, you could see what add-ons were popular with people you know, and get recommendations based on those favorites.
Last year I blogged that we were no longer actively developing or fixing bugs with the application behind Rock Your Firefox, a part of AMO’s codebase. Sadly, we’ll be ending support and disabling Rock Your Firefox this Friday. We may re-launch again in the future when we can rewrite the application to fix numerous bugs and make use of many new features on both AMO and the Facebook Platform.
As a way to remember the good times you had with Rock Your Firefox, make sure to grab a Rock Your Firefox Wallpaper before it’s too late.
Facebook recently changed the way comments appear from this:
to this:
You can add this to your userContent.css in Firefox to set it back to having a line break after the person’s name.
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.facebook.com/) {
.commentable_item .comment_box .comment_content .comment_author {
display: block !important;
}
.commentable_item .comment_box .comment_content .comment_actual_text {
padding-left: 0 !important;
}
}
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.
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.
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.
