We are getting ready to start inviting people to come-on-over and help test the next version of the Spread Firefox web site, its going to be a great next step for Firefox community marketing with lots of great new tools to empower users to organize projects/campaigns and general grass roots promotions so if your interested in helping test the alpha site features post in the comments on this spreadfirefox.com post or alternatively ping me directly.
Cheers, Ian
Thanks largely to the fine work of Giddie, we have a new entertainment set up in the UK office. Meet ‘Martha’ our Glaxstar Audioslave… Otherwise know as the old 17″ Powerbook that was kicking around the office.
Now with iTunes and Vine Server installed, allowing each of us to share our personal iTunes collection over our wireless network and control the thing with the beauty of Chicken of the VNC.
Finally, we use Audioscrobbler to upload our musical tastes to last.fm and feed it all right back here to the blog using a XML feed.
So go on, have a good laugh at our musical tastes. None of it’s my fault… Honest! 
Wow! We have to say a big thank you everyone who has downloaded Glubble, the response has been amazing. And an extra big thanks to everyone’s whoâ’ve left feedback. Rest assured guys, we are hearing what you’re saying and are working like eager beavers to fix bugs and implement the features you want.
We try our best to answer each support email for Glubble in a timely fashion, but we do have several known issues that we’re working on and your support enquiry may fall under that. We will get back to you all.
We are glad to say that Glubble is coming on in leaps and bounds and we are looking forward to the 1.0 release in the fall this year. Expect many improvements along the way, we are looking forward to publishing our product development roadmap soon to tell you about all the improvements you can expect to see over the coming weeks and months.
The Team!
Glubble Beta is launched on time on 19th June 2007 and looking like its being really well received with day one news posts appearing on Cnet Lifehacker Techcrunch Washington Post Wired and super cool user sites like TechDadBlog and Demo Girl
On the first day there were 300 search results for Glubble on Google, now on the second day there are 80,000 amazing eh? Technorati is showing an amazing amount of people talking about Glubble on their blogs too
We’ve had to maintain silence about Glubble for a long time and its great now to finally be able to tell the world that we have a new add-on service for Firefox to protect young children on the web.
Glubble turns Firefox into a multi-user, family browser and is designed to create an Internet world you can trust for young kids based on family participation
During the past two weeks, over half the Glaxstar team have relocated to Santa Clara for the past two weeks preparing for the launch of Glubble. We were all super-tired in the run up to the launch and now it’s very satisfying to see all the hard work of the team come good while we watch the downloads take off and the user registrations start to fly!
We have been working on Glubble for a long time here at Glaxstar its our own company product and cause, but, its been fun along the way that we’ve been privileged to work on some pretty amazing add-ons for Firefox over the past two years.
We love apple stuff at Glaxstar, strange though when most of the users of Firefox Add-Ons are probably windows users. Don’t get us wrong we don’t hate Windows (Giddie actually likes it a lot) but 9 out of 10 Glaxstar folks that express a preference, say their laps prefer them! (maybe that’s a UK only joke/parody?)
btw - one of the coolest things about starting work full time at Glaxstar is that you get the standard issue kit that includes your very own brand new-shiny Apple Mac Book Pro! Sweet eh!
‘Twas June 2006 when Glaxstar worked with Mozilla to author the Joga.com companion for Firefox it was developed for a Nike/Google collaboration for the Fifa World Cup Football tournament (soccer to the US)
Existing Firefox users could install an add-on into their browser and new-to-Firefox users could download a bundled Firefox distribution. This project was pretty much the first time that Mozilla had offered an extension+Firefox bundle based on a third party service before to my knowledge.
Its was a ride! Work began just four weeks before kick-off, its was quite nerve racking to only get our hands on the actual live data feed from the Google Bangalore guys just 24 hours before kick-off (till this point we’d been working on dummy static data formats) and then to top it all off our first beta test of actual data feeds was during the first game of the tournament!
I remember sitting at home watching the first game while IM’ing live with Firefox usability and UI lead, Mike Beltzner in Canada who was watching the same game live in Toronto from a BBC satellite feed and Ray who was also at home watching the match and the feed from Google. We were pinging each other as the game progressed, making sure the alert mechanism was working properly in the browser, Goals yellow cards, red cards, half time, full time, there was a big list of event alerts to test and we had to wait for each one to happen live before we could test to see if it worked properly, happy days!
Suffice to say I think we all “lived the game†pretty much for most of the tournament, it was an intense experience. As the downloads grew the companion hit QPS (queries per second) predictions pretty quickly. Glaxstar rushed live updates to cope with demand by changing the throttling of the server calls in the companion more than once! I don’t think Ray and I had much sleep as we worked on PDT time from the UK.
At its peak the new download rate for the extension/bundle was running at hundreds of thousands of downloads per day, figures talked about were over 2 million active users per game. Its all in the game!
The theme switcher for this add-on proved to be popular, to explain, with it users could change the theme of Firefox by selecting their team from a drop down menu. Shooting forward to today (June 07) and I’m pleased to see this feature has more recently been built upon and is not a pilot add-on by Chris Beard called personas , it rocks you should try it out, it has big potential imo.
Glaxstar got a new pad in the summer of 2006, didn’t it look nice!
We had a company de-grease the old factory, sent in the painters and a carpet firm and hey-presto! One Inter-web-thingy-company funky studio.
Tada, thats better!
Its a pretty comfortable place for an old factory space, nice high ceiling and an airy feel. The ipod system sounds awesome when we have it set loud in the open space. The pool table is a welcome break from the laptop screen too.
Shooting forward to today (June 07|) Soon we will be off and moving to the big city of Birmingham (UK’s second city) Its a cool place with a lot of IT and web technology companies, we just need to find somewhere that fits our personality, we don’t want to live too near the suits!
In the late summer of 2005 Chris Fralic the then VP of business development and Albert Wenger CEO of del.icio.us contacted me to discuss a new tool bar they were working on for Firefox they wanted some help to finish it. They also wanted to launch asap for some reason.
After an couple of initial conference calls I was able to change the tactic from launching a tool bar, to instead offer a more integrated Firefox experience, the result was del.icio.us 1.0 add-on for Firefox which was an instant success. It did just-one-thing-really-well, it made interaction with your delicious account easier, faster and an all round better experience.
If my memory serves me correctly, I think this add-on was responsible for introducing the now ubiquitous first-run-page-in-a-tab for Firefox add-ons. For those who have not seen one, when you install an add-on in Firefox its now popular to show a web page in a new tab when Firefox is first restarted after the installation has taken place. I think this is a very useful aid for new users to enable them to get more information about the add-on at the moment they are most likely to need it.
Full kudos to the delicious team for going into the dark with some of our ideas, Dan Kantor in particular was awesome to work with on the integration side, it was a pleasure working with these guys not to mention an honour to be trusted to deliver such a high profile add-on for Firefox, I think at one point everyone I met, read or watched on line seemed to be using it, and you still see the menubar icons (expertly produced by the excellent Jamey Boje aka graphics guru) in many a screen shots of Firefox even today in 2007!
The official delicious extension 1.0 launched in the fall of 2005 and soon became one of the most popular downloads for Firefox at the time. On the 9th December shortly after Albert pinged me to tell me that del.icio.us had just brought by Yahoo! I think around this time things started to get very exciting for web companies again.
While creating this new blog I thought it would be nice to have some shiny brand-spanking new blog icons too. So I created this set of 8 icons, in two different themes no less!
This faboulus set of blog icons are yours for the downloading, and include icons for…
They’re png on transparent for ease of use. Download them all now! (zip)
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The Team
