Daryl’s Flock Blog

Before too terribly long, we’ll publish a big boring document about trademarks. I read the thing a couple of weeks ago and, no offense to Bart, who authored much of the original document for Mozilla and who tweaked it for our purposes, but it’s not exactly fun reading. We had had a couple of queries about using some of the graphics from our theme (and in one case porting our theme to Firefox), and several of us made some time to discuss the matter last week.

Our theme is a little problematic because a lot of it looks a lot like our logo. There’s nothing essentially Firefoxy about the default Firefox theme, but there is something distinctly Flockish about our nav buttons. And, like Firefox, we need to protect our logo and derived images pretty aggressively in order to preserve our brand. So it was a pretty sticky issue for us, and one not devoid of some contention. But we worked out something that I think is good for the community and for Flock. Full boring details will follow later, but here’s the quick take on trademark as it relates to theme assets, at lest:

technorati tags: flock, community, theme, dev, extend

I’ve been thinking a lot about extensions over the last couple of months because we’re slowly working on getting our extensions site up and running. Thanks to much great feedback on a blog post I wrote last week, I feel reasonably certain we’re going to proceed with some sort of hybrid of several of the listing strategies I proposed. That is, we’ll list pretty much all the Flock extensions we know about, the Flock crew will single some out as especially worth your time, and we’ll devise some way of incorporating community feedback as well.

The big problem with community feedback and ratings is that people have a tendency to try to game the system. Some have suggested that using click counts rather than user ratings is a more accurate measure of how popular an extension is, though that seems as easily gameable as ratings. You can click to download or write a script to elevate click counts as easily as you can do so to add ratings. And whereas you can limit ratings to one per user per extension by forcing a login to rate, you can’t reasonably limit extension download clicks. So I’m not convinced that click counting is the best metric for quality. Nor am I particularly convinced that a simple ratings system is the best route.

I wonder if a more complex rating system might be useful. Consider that in the original feedback request, one of the concerns I mentioned was that we want to find ways of helping improve the quality of extensions. That was in fact part of the reason for our considering featuring only the best of the best, as doing so raises the bar (theoretically, though I’ve always suspected that in practice it would just tick people off) and stands to benefit the community as a whole. So what if the rating system helped us gauge quality in different areas?

Suppose that each extension lets you rate it along several axes. I’ll tentatively propose “works well,” “looks good,” and “has good user interaction” as three such areas. Each one can be rated on maybe a five-point scale from very poor to very good (or strongly disagree to strongly agree). This lets us do a few things. It lets us quantify based on user feedback how extensions measure up in the different areas. This is useful to both users and developers, though it may not always be an ego saver. More importantly, it gives us a basis for helping match developers with graphics or usability gurus. Perhaps there’s an extension whose core functionality is outstanding but is a beast to use. These metrics help developers figure that out based on feedback from people using the extensions. In principle, design volunteers can go looking for high-functionality/low-design extensions and offer their help. The same goes for developers watching for high-design/low-functionality extensions. This setup also makes it a little harder to game the system because it’s not strictly a one-dimensional “good or bad” rating. If an extension developer elevates his numbers by gaming the system, his extension perhaps gets more visibility from a download perspective, but it gets less visibility from a QA perspective and never improves. By elevating all of your numbers, in other words, you reduce the likelihood of getting feedback that’ll help you improve your extension. And I think that most extension developers have honest intentions and relish feedback on their work.

So, these are just a few quick thoughts on one possible way of handling ratings on an extensions site. I’d love to have lots of feedback on what’s right and wrong about this approach. I’d also love to hear ideas for other innovative approaches not only to helping float the best extensions but also to letting the process drive quality and community (ie, pairing designers with developers). Speak up, peanut gallery!

technorati tags: flock, community, extend

I’ve always enjoyed the abbreviations the Mozilla community has used. The 14-year-old boy in me gets a kick out of saying MoFo. The amateur linguist in me thrills at the amo abbreviation for addons.mozilla.org, as amo means “I love” in Latin, and this is a fitting expression given that the ability to extend Firefox is one of its most appealing features for many. Although I learned yesterday that Flock has been removed from Firefox’s list of supported applications (at the FAQ), the addons site does have a category for extensions that support Flock. This is great news, as it provides an interim solution to the trust issue I brought up yesterday. These extensions are uploaded by their authors and QA’d by Mozilla folk, so they should be safe and functional. As more and more authors port their extensions to work with Flock, more and more should appear at amo. Big thanks to the crew at Mozilla for showing us some love by listing Flock extensions.

technorati tags: flock, community, extend

We’re considering several approaches to publishing Flock extensions, and I want to get a feel for what the community thinks of the various approaches. There are two major considerations that pull in opposite directions:

1. Quality. In order to maintain a high-quality brand going forward, it might pay to limit what extensions we bless and associate with our brand. This approach guarantees for users that the extensions we feature are of high quality and provide a unified experience. The approach is exclusive, however, as many useful extensions might not pass muster from an experience perspective. For example, a neat extension produced by someone with limited UI experience or graphics resources might not make the cut. If we take this approach, it will be especially important that we work to provide resources that help developers produce high-quality extensions. If we limit what we feature, we should empower developers to stand a better chance of having their extensions make the cut. If we raise the bar by limiting what extensions we list, we raise the bar for extensions development, which ultimately benefits everybody.
2. Trust. Installing extensions from unknown sources can be dangerous, so it’s important to have an authoritative list of extensions that have been verified to work and not to be malicious. This approach serves the larger user base and supports extensions that are valuable despite a lack of UI polish (for example), but it does so at a potential cost to user experience and thus dilutes the experience we’re working toward providing within Flock.

This is kind of tricky to talk about, incidentally, as it’s definitely not our intention to denigrate the efforts of community developers. It’s just a reality that some developers are better developers than UI designers (and vice versa). We’re juggling here whether to try to enhance the overall experience of using Flock by listing only the best of the best extensions and whether to enhance the extensibility for a broader user base by listing everything under the sky that works with Flock.

It seems to me that there are several reasonable approaches:

1. Feature only the best of the best, period. The community can provide and vet other sites to list extensions, but Flock officially endorses only the best as chosen by the Flock crew.
2. List everything we know of and allow users to drill down and search for all extensions, but emphasize very heavily the best of the best as chosen by the Flock crew.
3. List everything we know of and allow users to drill down and search for all extensions, but emphasize very heavily the best of the best as chosen by the community through ratings, etc.
4. Blend approaches 2 and 3, allowing the community to bubble extensions up but also allowing the Flock crew to emphasize what we consider the best fits based on quality, branding, etc.
5. Just list everything, singling out at most things like recent and most downloaded.

There may be other reasonable approaches as well. This seems to cover most of the continuum, though. So, what do you think? Is raising the bar for extensions development worth possibly alienating some developers (my big concern)? Or is it more important to establish trust, making it easy for users to confidently install any extension that’s known to be safe and to work with Flock? I’d love to hear from both users and developers on this matter. I have a meeting on this stuff on Thursday.

technorati tags: flock, community, extend