We moved into a new office today, for those of you who watch our weekly updates, you can see what it’s like for us speakers.
For more pictures, check out my set on Flickr. Now I have to get back to work…
20
May 09
Introducing Jetpack
Today, Mozilla Labs announced Jetpack, a new and experimental way of creating add-ons in Firefox. The best way to explain the Jetpack experience is by showing how add-ons are created using the new platform.
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!
11
May 09
The future of Add-ons
For the company all-hands, I made this presentation about the future of Add-ons for Mozilla.
View more presentations from osunick.
This was an fun presentation to create and give because I’m incredibly excited about the future of add-ons. To me, add-ons are the ultimate form of user-generated content, created by a group of users who are more passionate, intelligent, and principled than any user communitv I’ve seen. It’s an honor to help give them exposure to the massive Mozilla user base.
Many thanks to the entire team (credited in the presentation, and I’m sure I missed some people), and also to Jeff Bonforte, my Keynote muse, who blogs lots of useful and actionable advice on making non-sucky presentations.
01
Apr 09
Change-around your life for good!
I’m thrilled to announce that after testing 41 different synonyms for “Add-ons”, we’ve determined that “Change-Arounds” is the winner by an amazing margin of .006%.
WIth “Change” coming to Washington in 2009, we also felt that we could take advantage of the goodwill that this word generates in the hearts and minds of Firefox users everywhere.
So rejoice and Change Around your life on the internet with Firefox Change-Arounds!
09
Feb 09
AMO is a Renegade Craft Fair
Seriously. Think about this- addons.mozilla.org has over 6,000 add-ons and add-on developers. Our add-ons are created by large corporations as well as people with day jobs. Our number 1 add-on was created by a hobbyist in his spare time and has been downloaded 40 million times. Our add-ons can turn Firefox into a kid-friendly browser or a Twitter application. Like the Renegade Craft Fair, we’ve got an amazing array of stuff but we fall short in one key way- we’re not as fun. We want to change that- we want to replicate the excitement of finding the unexpected so that our visitors always something they want, even if it’s not something they expect. We want to make “serendipitous discovery” the way most people interact with AMO. Any ideas?
28
Jan 09
AMO in 2009
Tomorrow, the AMO team will be presenting our 2009 plan. It’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and it’s time we shared with the community that has made us who we are today.
Come to air.mozilla.com tomorrow at 12:30 PM PST and watch it live. You’ll also be able to ask questions live via the website.
AMO 2009
View more presentations or upload your own.
In a nutshell, our thesis is that AMO is an incubator for innovation, and our goal is to help developers on our platforms succeed. We can provide the audience, support, and data that can help users and developers get the best possible experience.
We have the technology, we can rebuild AMO.
Thoughts?
-Nick
15
Jan 09
7 Things You May (Or May Not) Know About Me
Rey, our stalwart AMO Community Mobilizer, has managed to rope me into this- so here goes.
- I won the sixth grade spelling bee and was carried on the shoulders of my classmates. It’s all been downhill since then.
- I got the PM job at Yahoo! Answers because I was the #1 user on the site during our internal alpha, and my management (wisely) figured that my hobby would better serve them if it was my official job.
- My father, brother, and sister-in-law are all doctors. I was also pre-med in undergrad but after a couple crappy years of mediocre grades, I realized it wasn’t in the cards for me.
- My first computer was an Atari 400, and I secretly wanted a Coleco Adam. Fortunately my parents, in a surprising bit of technological savvy, decided to get me an Apple IIc instead.
- I live the life I wanted when I was 12 years old. I live in a futuristic house, married to a person much cooler than I am, have pets, and play lots of video games.
- My wife attended Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. I tagged along and worked at Ford for 2 years. I love cars, but hated working in the auto industry.
- If I wasn’t doing product management right now, I think I’d like being a general contractor. I like making things better.
And Rey, I’m your Boss In Name Only. Nobody tells Rey Bango what to do. Nobody.
7 victims:
1. Dave Dash (for commenting first)
31
Dec 08
Unlikely adversaries: cars and personal electronics?
Via Autoblog, I found this article in the Detroit News, which says that Japanese automakers are worried about sales in Japan because young people are shifting their interest away from cars and towards gadgets.
The appeal of driving yourself boils down to personal space and freedom. But nowadays we spent most of our driving going to one of two places, and portable devices allow you to create a personal space virtually anywhere. While they don’t erect a physical barrier with the outside world, an iPod or Kindle allows its user to effectively shut out the outside world, even in the middle of a crowded train.
Technology has also diminished the significance of physical location; half of Mozilla’s employees are remote and they seem to have no trouble getting as much done as the rest of us. How long will it be until commuting and travel become obsolete altogether?
29
Dec 08
Facebook Lexicon
Joshua showed me Facebook Lexicon today, which launched a few months ago but apparently I live under a rock. Lexicon is a feature that lets you see the relative frequencies of words that occur on Wall posts, and it’s really fun to play with.
For instance, comparing “blond” to “blonde”, it appears that the latter is far more popular:
Another interesting faceoff is “you” and “your” vs “u” and “ur”. I predict some sort of apocalypse when “u” overtakes “you”.
Individual wall posts are basically throwaway messages, analogous to that whiteboard you had on the door of your dorm room. Not terribly interesting, but being able to see this data in aggregate is much more interesting, especially since the throwaway nature of these posts means that people write in a way that is most natural to them.
I could imagine this being useful for SEO, creating online ad campaigns, or just general zeitgeist tracking. For instance, looking at ‘obama’ and ‘mccain’ in Lexicon shows a real dropoff after the election, with McCain all but dying out and Obama maintaining a slow but steady trickle of wall posts. I imagine we’ll see a spike as we approach the inauguration (yay!).
28
Dec 08
Christmas 2008: wood paneling!
Picking the right panels
Staycation remodeling projects have become a tradition in our household, and we finally removed the nasty sheetrock from our hallway over the Christmas break. Demolition on the 24th, hanging panels on 25th, and the obligatory trip to the dump on the 26th. Click on the photo to see how it went!
