My parents took me to Vietnam for the very first time last December, and I’ve been thinking a lot about technology, the world, and the incredible times that we live in.  When my parents left South Vietnam 34 years ago, they were not only leaving a country that was dissolving around them, but also lives of comfort and prestige to start all over again as a factory worker and short-order cook at a truck stop.  As a child growing up in Ohio, I had this impression that Vietnam was a faraway and fuzzy land, one that, truthfully, was no more real to me than Middle Earth.

From the moment I arrived, this impression evaporated, replaced by the reality of what I experienced.  I saw a place where 65% of the population was under 30, where education is perceived as the path to upward mobility, and a society where the past 30 years of economic development has been compressed into 10 years.  Vietnam is a place of unsurprisingly delicious foods and amazing vistas, but it’s also a place where many people live without plumbing and sanitation, and the average person earns less than $100 a month.  Vietnam is definitely a developing country- one with a vast gulf between the Bentley-driving elite and the average person, and it’s also a country that’s getting its first music television channel and 3G broadband at the same time.

This was a significant trip for me- I saw the birthplace of my parents, heard stories of their escape in 1975, and met family members I didn’t know I had.  We slept on a boat in Ha Long Bay, visited the thousand-year-old capital of Hanoi, heard government music every morning at 5am for daily calisthenics, toured the former Independence Palace in Saigon, saw the floating markets of Can Tho, and saw the imperial villa in the mountain city of Da Lat.  While my parents were patient and generous tour guides, it was clear that today’s Vietnam was almost as new to them as it was to me and my wife.  Even the language had evolved after 35 years of reunification and modernization.

As a Mozilla employee, I work on making the internet better for everyone.  As the Director of Add-ons, I want to empower people to change not only the world but their own lives with open and free technologies.  I get constant reminders of how fortunate I am to have the opportunity to focus my professional energies on such a noble pursuit, but nowhere has this been more poignant than Vietnam.  Over there, I saw idealistic young people who were empowered and determined to not only change their own destinies, but also the destiny of their entire country.  The Internet remains a new and wondrous thing there, and throngs of aspirational young Vietnamese spend their entire savings on computers and internet access.  Free distance learning programs empower the motivated with the technology skills to become programmers and make a transformational change to the quality of their lives.

This is amazing.  When someone has the potential to increase their income tenfold from free lessons on the internet, it underscores how vital it is that the basic technologies for creating and browsing content on the Internet remain free and open.  First-world software economics here are patently ludicrous- the iPhone developer program costs the equivalent of an entire month’s salary.  The fundamental web technologies that drive innovation on the web and browser should continue to be free without a tax on innovation, and many of these free technologies form the building blocks of commercial services and software.  There is no irony in earning a living with Open Source.

On a more personal note, my father spent the first 61 years of his life without the ability to type in Vietnamese- until a Firefox extension made it trivially easy for him to do so.  A tiny piece of software written by a Vietnamese-American college student gave him the gift of written communication in his native language.  Add-ons are often written by people who are trying to meet their own needs.  The fact that our needs are so similar is a reminder that we are more alike than we are different.

Don’t worry, Nate- we won’t be annoying with it. 

I’ve had the good fortune of meeting fellow nerds from all over the world, and I’ve noticed the ones who don’t come from Silicon Valley remain enchanted by technology and its promise to make the world better.  They’re the ones hacking away on Twitter and Firefox and really pushing the envelope on the future for those products.  Many of  top Firefox add-on developers come from Europe and Asia, and Brazil’s wholesale adoption of open source and social software is a phenomenon to behold.  Korea’s obsession with Starcraft shows no signs of waning eleven years after that game’s release.

While our short attention spans compel us to keep creating and trying new things, does our eagerness to invent prevent us from honing our craft?  Does great software evolve through people who lose their otaku sense of wonder?  Seesmic relocated to San Francisco in an attempt to secure respect in the startup world, but I wonder if Silicon Valley, with its populace of short-attention-span inhabitants, will continue to be the epicenter of technology moving forward.

I’m not terribly worried about America- I still see that twinkle in the eyes of my friends and colleagues from other parts of the country, but I do think that we should get over ourselves and try to remember that technology that makes the lives of people better is something that we want in the hands of as many folks as possible.

If you’re around and want to say hi and grab some swag, come to the Renegade Craft Fair- it’s totally free and totally AWESOME.

My 3.5 day whirlwind tour of Brazil is now over, and I found it incredibly enlightening and wonderful in so many ways.  The South American Mozilla community is amazing- their energy and dedication is an enormous testament to the foothold that FOSS has in that region of the world.  People were genuinely excited to learn more about Mozilla and I was honored that so many came to my talk- I hope that those who attended found it useful.  Brazil is a very close #5 in overall traffic and I can easily see them getting to #3 by the end of the year.  I also mentioned Extend Firefox as a way for community members to submit great add-ons and win prizes and recognition for their hard work.

Mozilla is a truly global phenomenon- something I knew before but my visit to Brazil makes it something I feel much more.  I’m proud of how our team has created a site that is localized in dozens of languages and I want to do more to make sure that add-ons are presented in a way that’s specifically engaging to each region of the world.  If you have any ideas- please let me know.

Enormous thanks goes to Alix Franquet for making sure this was no meaningless junket- every second of our time was spent engaging with the community- from students to entrepreneurs to companies interested in Mozilla.  A big thanks as well to Bruno Magrani- without whom we would certainly be lost, eating the wrong things, and getting in trouble.  Finally, thanks to everyone who helped us at the booth- in no particular order those would be Felipe, Augusto, Clauber, Andrea, Bruna, the other Felipe, Guillermo, Marcio, Antonio, Mario and anyone else I may have missed.

Lots of late night coding, testing, pondering and pushing has resulted in the birth of a healthy baby-blue AMO!  Lots of people worked hard on this release and I’m incredibly proud of what we launched.

Beauty, in this case, is much more than skin deep as we’ve also released Collections, a new feature that allows our users to share their favorite add-ons with the entire Mozilla community- because you don’t have to be a developer to be a valuable part of our ecosystem.  Next up- add-on contributions and tagging.  This train isn’t stopping anywhere…

A big thanks to the AMO team (you know who you are) and the design team at Clearleft for their hard work!

For more pictures, check out my set on Flickr.  Now I have to get back to work…

To get started, install the new Jetpack Extension and restart the browser (this will be the only time you’ll need to restart when doing development).  When Jetpack installs, you’ll be taken to the about:jetpack page, which contains a couple of sample Jetpacks (the name for extensions created with the Jetpack API).

Install some demos and check them out!  For the time being, the experiment is limited to status bar widgets, but I was able to put together a Delicious Notifier Jetpack Feature in less than an hour using simple JQuery, CSS, and html. All I did was install the GMail Notifier widget and pasted it into Bespin, read the 20 lines of code that made it work, and started hacking away to get the information i wanted.  Since I didn’t have to restart and could inspect and debug via Firebug, development was painless.

If you have Jetpack installed, check out my Delicious Notifier, I find it incredibly useful when browsing the web, as the count of saves in Delicious is a great indicator of how interesting a particular page on the internet can be.

As with all experiments, there’s a lot of polishing to do with Jetpack, but we felt that it was true to Mozilla’s values to get this out early and involve the community in determining its future- please let us know what you think!