A recent article over at Wired.com opens with, "First they reinvented the browser, now they're rewriting the rules of advertising."
I must say that I take a great deal of personal and professional satisfaction from that lead.
It was just over three years ago, sitting in an IRC channel, that a few of us set out to reinvent Mozilla's browser. After six months of hacking and chopping with broad strokes, we had something cleaner, faster, and simply better than the Mozilla browser. Not only that, but we had something we knew could take on the market leader, IE.
Two years later, with a great browser in hand, Blake Ross and I started to focus on how to spread Firefox to the masses. We knew that our most valuable asset was the growing community of Firefox users and so we started to engage them, one at a time, and one on one. We began by asking people who were blogging about how great Firefox was if they'd be willing to put up a button or other permanent link. After about a week of emailing and dozens of successes, Blake and I realized that this had great potential, but that we weren't going to scale. So we reached out again, and asked our community for help building a web-based tool to manage this new buttons project. A guy named Andrew Cave stepped up and built the tool we needed. The Spread Firefox effort was born.
Since then, we've seen over 100,000 people sign up with Spread Firefox to help spread the word about the world's best browser. We've seen tens of thousands of enthusiastic users putting up Firefox buttons and link on websites, blogs, and in email signatures. We've seen thousands of volunteers contribute money to take out a two page ad in the New York Times. It's been nothing short of incredible.
There's no doubt that this community of volunteers has played a key role in helping Firefox achieve the nearly 60 million downloads it's had so far and there's no doubt that they all of us at Spread Firefox will continue to lead the way with fun and creative grassroots marketing.
Today, we are leading the way. Even other browsers are following our lead with spreading efforts of their own. But it doesn't stop at browsers, either. Creative Commons seems to be moving towards a Spread Firefox model, Open Office has a Spread Open Office site, Go Trillian has a set of tools and layout almost identical to SFX.
Posted by asa at May 24, 2005 08:20 PMAgain, although spreadfirefox.com was a great idea, I feel that it has been neglected in the last few months. It really needs to be updated and all of the great ideas that the community had for making the website more engaging and functional should be put in place instead of just sitting there as good, but unimplemented ideas.
Lastly, how on Earth did http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/15509 get upgraded to be on the front page (not that it's bad or anthing), but this, http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/15480, which is a direct and useful piece of information about how people can spread Firefox to their friends gets ignored, twice, despite me asking the admins to put it up. I would understand if they gave a reason, but they didn't even reply. Also, the links to the community resources wiki have been removed (why on Earth, that was important!?), and lots of great ideas for community/MoFo communication (such as coming up with various marketting groups and targetting them with different messages) have been totally ignored.
spreadfirefox.com is better than nothing, but it needs some people with time on their hands, and the ability to liase with the decision makers (Asa for example) to make it more useful than it is now.
Posted by: Robert on May 25, 2005 12:24 AMThe irony is that the people at http://my.opera.com/community/ have done a better job than those at spreadfirefox at making a useful resource for Opera fanboys. Despite several people pointing out the ways in which it is better, and the fact that we should implement some of their ideas, the people who could do those things remain ominously silent.
Posted by: Robert on May 25, 2005 12:27 AMBlinding effort. Amazing. Firefox is part of a basic human requirement/tool kit that everyone should have. Tools like enough education to read and write, and access to the information through firefox.
tum-te-tum
john.e.boy
Posted by: john.e.boy on May 25, 2005 12:43 AMFirefox has had a very successful and amazing marketing campaign.
HOWEVER. You say that Opera is FOLLOWING your LEAD with the MyOpera community? Sorry to burst your bubble, but MyOpera was around before SpreadFirefox. It's been around since at least late 2003 that I know of.
Posted by: vcv on May 25, 2005 01:04 AMvcv: Did my.opera have the affiliates and buttons stuff before Spread Firefox?
Posted by: David Naylor on May 25, 2005 01:50 AMAFAIK Opera did have an affiliate program before, but it wasn't very popular among Opera users (simply because most didn't know about it). And of course the Opera community site is much older than SpreadFirefox.
Posted by: Poop on May 25, 2005 04:39 AMvcv, poop, April? Not really before Spread Firefox, I'd say.
http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?s=36874926cad3f308468dfa70f77d153a&threadid=87565
afer posts like these http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?s=a65adae071629dc2bcefa2d7a0569a32&threadid=70223
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on May 25, 2005 07:09 AMSecond to last paragraph, "roll" should be "role". :)
Posted by: Step on May 25, 2005 07:51 AMWhat's planned this summer? Firefox 1.1 is coming up (pre-alpha, but still!), and Microsofts MSIE 7.0 Beta will make its appearance. With the new MSI package, it is time to the Spreadfirefox ninjas to infiltrate the corporate world.
Posted by: ADAXL on May 25, 2005 08:19 AMActually, Opera has had buttons and banners available for years. I had one on my site back in 1999 or 2000.
It was the obvious response to the "Netscape Now!" and "Free! Internet Explorer" buttons strewn across the web during the browser wars.
Posted by: Kelson on May 25, 2005 09:47 AMKelson, buttons do not an affiliate program make. It's clear that their community page was revamped around a Spread Firefox model with an affiliates program, a rollcall highlight of the leaders in that program, a link to go vote in download.com polls (something Opera fans were complaining about SFX doing just a couple months ago), blog highlighting, a brand new "student task force" etc, etc.
This is not just "buttons and banners"
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on May 25, 2005 12:34 PM> something Opera fans were complaining about SFX doing just a couple months ago
Opera users were complaining about many negative Opera reviews like "Get FF!", "FF rulez!" with the lowest possible score for Opera, which started to appear the same day when the "1000 Firefox reviews" action started.
Posted by: Poop on May 25, 2005 01:01 PMI didn't know Firefox invented the concept of an affiliate program.
Posted by: vcv on May 25, 2005 01:02 PMLOL at http://www.getinternetexplorer.com/
compare with www.getfirefox.com
Posted by: James on May 25, 2005 01:06 PMI would like to praise you for doing such great things for marketing.
However, latecomers Opera and OpenOffice.org have overtaken you in something that could be called the first generation of e-viral marketing. Their implementation is just more simple and focused, which finally makes them better. Of course, their communities are much smaller, which also have effect on their campaigns (and OpenOffice.org definetly needs to wait for more user-friendly version 2.0 to be wide spread).
I know that you are cooking something and that it smells good, but I would just like to point this.
Posted by: Ivan Icin on May 25, 2005 04:29 PMthe irony is that advertisers would market getinternetexplorer.com
I have a get firefox on my website!
Why is it that when someone says Firefox another says opera or internet explorer?
Posted by: JMack on May 25, 2005 05:24 PMSee, it IS possible to write a blog post that praises Firefox without putting down Opera! well done!
Just to clarify, if I remember correctly, the Opera affiliate program started after SpreadFirefox.com, but they've had banners for years.
Anyway, congrats on the article!
Posted by: Nunya on May 25, 2005 06:44 PMAsa:
I've installed Firefox on about 20 machines so far - friends, family and coworkers. All of them agree that Firefox is better than IE. But...
After a while, they all come back to me saying "Firefox doesn't support this site and that site".
You see, there are too many IE-only sites out there, and people rely on them, so they can't switch.
My point: if you want more people to switch, you'll have to make web developers build standards-compliant sites. That should be the new focus of SpreadFirefox.com.
Noam.
Posted by: Noam Tamim on May 26, 2005 12:24 AMThe SFX website needs a lot of work, IMO it's walking on the wrong foot at the moment.
Firstly, the idea that SFX is for blogs is a bad concept of design. SFX is more of a forum than a personal blog. We get too much spam and useless posts, whats more only the sfx category shows on the home page meaning everybody posts there, as no other posts are listed from the other category. For those posts made in the other category they receive almost no votes or comments because it is too hard to find them and view them amongst it all.
SFX needs some serious refocusing and restructuring. For starters I would recommend that down the side the following is listed:
* Five "sticky" threads selected by the SFX team
* The top ten threads as voted by the users
* The ten latest threads from the SFX category
* The ten most recent posts from all Categories excluding SFX listed above (so that decent threads from the other categories get seen, voted on and commented upon so that they get a chance to be pushed into the top ten.
Also we should get messages when someone replies to a message we've said, it is almost impossible to conduct anything resembling a conversation on SFX due to this obvious function left out.
Posted by: Kroc Camen on May 26, 2005 03:19 AMI don't really like the feel of SFX it's way too cluttered and It'd be better if it were more of a Forum instead of a mass blogging site which makes it harder to get around. Great concept but needs improvement.
Posted by: Free as a bird on May 26, 2005 06:50 PMLead...
Please, let's give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar: Tristan Nitot just rocked making possible those videos, and he deserves enough credit for that to be explicitely named in your post, or in these comments.