Spread Firefox
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Spread Firefox, officially abbreviated as SFx, is a community of tens of thousands of Mozilla Firefox enthusiasts whose goal is to spread Firefox as far and wide as possible. The community website, founded by Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler, launched on September 14, 2004 is based on Drupal, an open source content management system. It is the first major grassroots open source outreach and marketing effort. It also won the Best Marketing Project at the UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2005.
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[edit] History and development
[edit] Pre-SFx events
Before the formation of SFx website, there was a series of events, dubbed "marketing week", loosely organized by Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler:
- July 7, 2004 ("marketing week 1"), the community was encouraged to vote on/review Firefox in CNET's Download.com, with the goal of one thousand reviews of Firefox in one week. The goal was quickly achieved, with 1369 people given Firefox a 96% approval rating, and 1220 people rated it straight fives across the board.
- July 15, 2004 ("marketing week 2"), the goal was to form a team (called "For the Record") of dedicated, committed and determined individuals that can be mobilized quickly to respond to three different types of press coverage: 1) factually inaccurate or sensationally misleading press; 2) relevant stories; and 3) thoughtful stories.
- July 23, 2004 ("marketing week 3"), the mission was to get fifty donations of advertising space in print or high traffic web sites.
- August 2, 2004 ("marketing week 4"), the goal was to directly contact dozens of bloggers who raved about Firefox and encourage them to add "Get Firefox" buttons on their blogs.
- August 20, 2004 ("marketing week 5"), the task was to help the community to prepare for a future college evangelism campaign.
Among various "marketing weeks", apparently the first one was the most successful one. To help facilitate the grassroot marketing campaigns, the SFx site was created.
[edit] Notable SFx events
[edit] Download.com feedbacks
This is an on-going event that encourages SFx members to vote and review Firefox in the Download.com website, in order to boost the rating of the browser and receive more attention from Download.com visitors. This is a contentious tactic as critics view this as manipulation of fact. However, supporters argue that SFx members are never forced to give their votes and write positive reviews. They are simply encouraged to give their opinions.
[edit] New York Times advertisement
On October 19, 2004, a small announcement went up on the SFx homepage. It said the group was going to attempt to raise money to publish a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to announce the release of Firefox 1.0. The ad was touted as a "declaration of independence" from Internet Explorer, and would include as signatures the names of all the contributors to the campaign. A goal was set to reach 2,500 names. When the ten day fundraising period was over, it was announced that over 10,000 people had contributed, and raised a total of $250,000 USD, about five times as much as had been expected.
With some delays, the advertisement was published on December 16, 2004, and was two full pages — the original plan was for just one page. At the same time, the Mozilla Foundation began selling a print and released a PDF version of the advertisement[1]. Downloads spiked 40% after the advertisement was published and the advertisement itself became a news story in the same and other publications[citation needed].
Unfortunately, there were many errors in the advertisement that ran in the paper, with many people's names misspelled, reversed or missed-off completely. To compensate, the Mozilla Foundation offered a free, autographed poster of the corrected advertisement to those affected. However, a number of contributors whose names appeared incorrectly on the advertisement were not on the separate list used to decide who was compensated and never received their posters or had their names corrected.
[edit] Prizes
On February 15, 2005, exactly 99 days after it was released, Firefox 1.0 passed the 25 million download milestone. To celebrate this, 25 of the 100 Firefox coins donated from CoinsForAnything were given to the most active SFx members. A 25% discount on some Mozilla Store merchandise was also given until 11:59 p.m. EST on February 17, 2005.
However, due to technical issues, the coins did not arrive at the Mozilla Foundation's office until April 21, 2005. The 25 coins were shipped and the remaining 75 coins will be given to SFx members who are "self-starters and people who can lead interesting and innovative programs for putting Firefox in the hands of more users".
On April 29, 2005, the cumulative download count for Firefox 1.x reached 50 million. A few days before reaching 50 million (April 26, 2005), the SFx team (Blake and Asa) made the announcement that anyone that who can do something to impress the people in Mozilla Foundation would be awarded with an unknown prize. An estimated download count, which was adjusted live via "Download Odometer" by Infocraft, was shown in the announcement.
On October 19, 2005, Firefox marked its 100 millionth download. SFxers were invited to take a photo of themselves with the 100 Million celebration page. The top ten best pictures would win coupons to grab free Mozilla Store merchandise to celebrate Firefox reaching 100 million downloads.
[edit] Current projects
[edit] Distributed computing teams
On September 26, 2004, a climateprediction.net (distributed computing for climate modeling) team was created. The aim was to promote Firefox while making the Earth a better place. This was later imitated as similar teams were created for other projects, such as SETI@home, Folding@home, LHC@home, Einstein@Home, grid.org, Pirates@home, Predictor@home, BURP, ALife@Home, SZTAKI Desktop Grid, Rosetta@home, PrimeGrid, XtremLab, μFluids@Home, and SIMAP (ordered by time of team creation). A team was also created in WhatPulse (not technically distributed computing), which monitors the numbers of keystrokes and mouse clicks that users make.
[edit] For the Record
This is the same as the For the Record project in the pre-SFx days. The project was restarted due to an increasing number of misleading press articles.
[edit] Promotional materials
SFx members have been creating many promotional materials, including banners, posters, slogans, icons, avatars, wallpaper and standardized email templates. An organized list of promotional resources can be found in the Mozilla Community Wiki.
Several Japanese computer dōjinshi individual artists have also created a unofficial mascot called "Firefox-ko", as inspired by the OS-tans. She is a personification of the browser, who is usually portrayed as a Japanese fox spirit (see kitsune). "Thunderbird-ko" and "Øpera-tan" was also created, but they are less popular.
[edit] Firefox Flicks
The Firefox Flicks project was a grassroots project started in December 2005 to create a 30-second video advertisement in hopes of raising awareness of the open-source web browser. Judges consisted of well-known personalities in the movie business and prizes included a $5,000 gift certificate to B&H, a professional video source.
[edit] World Firefox Day 2006
The World Firefox Day campaign started on July 15th 2006, which is the anniversary of the founding of the Mozilla Foundation, and ran until September 15 2006. It involves people registering themselves and a friend on the website for nomination to have their names displayed on the Firefox Friends Wall, a digital wall that will be displayed at the headquarters of the Mozilla Foundation. An e-mail is sent to the nominated friend which provides a hyperlink to download Mozilla Firefox. If the friend accepts to download the program the nomination is accepted. The names will also appear in the source code of the next version of Mozilla Firefox, Firefox 2.
[edit] Firefox Party
When Firefox 2.0 was released to the public, there was a Firefox party on the following weekend, with many spreadfirefox.com members setting up parties all over the world. Their locations could be found by an integration of the Google maps API.
[edit] Future
There are plans to significantly change the remit of Spread Firefox and move away from a focus on weblogs due to many projects 'failing' under the current set up. The new site should be ready soon.
[edit] Influence
Given the perceived success of SFx's community-based marketing, some open source and open content projects are also taking similar actions. The SpreadOpenOffice.org site of OpenOffice.org and the SpreadCC site (planning) of Creative Commons are prominent examples. There is also a site getgnulinux.org with the intention of promote the entire Linux operative system
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "New York Times Ad Posters and Name Corrections/Changes", The SFx Admins, Spread Firefox, retrieved August 22, 2006.
