Again, 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.

The 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.

Blinding 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

Firefox 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.

vcv: Did my.opera have the affiliates and buttons stuff before Spread Firefox?

AFAIK 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.

vcv, 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

Second to last paragraph, "roll" should be "role". :)

What'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.

Actually, 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.

Kelson, 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

> 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.

I didn't know Firefox invented the concept of an affiliate program.

LOL at http://www.getinternetexplorer.com/

compare with www.getfirefox.com

I 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.

the 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?

See, 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!

Asa:

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.

The 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.

I 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.

Lead...
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.