In truth, I think too much. And read too much. And write too little. Or rather, I write rather too much in all the wrong places. My digital notebooks are crammed past capacity, I have project wikis with many, many words of my (un)wisdom in them, but this blog here remains more or less empty.

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve felt that, although we’re more or less drowning in an ocean of inanity and disinformation, the best way for me to help with that issue is probably not by attempting to dilute the ocean with what I hope might pass for wit or even wisdom in some circles, and hopefully appear as less than complete inanity in others.

Of course, one person’s inanity is another person’s deeply personal and touching remarks, and the debate over what qualifies as “disinformation” will probably go on forever, although arguably it’s something worth debating, and I may have a few words to say on that subject at some stage in the future.

Now, apart from having so many other things I need to do, the reason I’ve been so quiet here is that I felt if I was going to say anything new, it ought to be something important, which is why I’m a little ashamed that my only post since the Feb 22 quake that (quite literally) upended our existence, which was already in a somewhat unstable state it has to be said, was about Unthink, a start-up hoping to capitalise on the perennial outrage over the privacy problems that plague most consumer focused websites, and of late, Facebook and Google in particular, as the largest incumbent aggregators of our collective inanity and disinformation.

Now, it’s entirely possible their startup adventure began with noble intent, and I hope it ends that way, but I do not see much chance that it’s actually going to work out for them. Facebook is the world’s best example of a “network-effect” start-up. People log into social networks because their friends are there, and all the privacy and control in the world isn’t going to interest anyone unless there is a sufficiently large audience of friends and family there to treat our inanities as deeply personal and touching remarks.

Meanwhile, on the monetization front, the merchants of disinformation are really not interested in advertising to people who care so much about privacy and control that they’re willing to switch to a site that at least initially, will have almost nobody on it. The idea that being a “brand ambassador” (as opposed to another pair of eyeballs for the advertisers) will somehow be sufficiently appealing to people that they’ll switch over and bring their friends also seems a little hopeful if you ask me.

And of course, the people who really do care about such things have other alternatives they already find more appealing – such as Diaspora nodes, which add such interesting adjectives as “distributed” and “open” to the promises of privacy and (one hopes) proper personalization.

I must admit, I found Unthink initially appealing, as did, apparently, Mr Fry. But I imagine that he, like myself, eventually decided that as in the parable of New Coke, a sip test is an insufficient indicator of an audience’s underlying desire for a bold and brash new flavour of an otherwise familiar product.

My best wishes to the Unkthink crew in their attempt to prove the doubters, such as myself, absolutely wrong, and eventually rise up to replace our current over-centralised consumer-grade conversation hub(s) with something newer and shinier at their own URL, but for me at least, the shine has worn off before I even get around to logging in, which I may or may not do at some time in the near future.

As, according to comments on Techcrunch today, they are finally into limited beta, and the rush to see what US$2.5m in start-up capital and some well deserved resentment towards the status quo can buy you in terms of traction has already crashed their servers, or at least, timed them out.

So instead of joining the Unthinking masses I’d best get back to my own little start-up, which managed to raise about a fiftieth of their pre-launch investment before we lost steam trying to build an IE6 version, and had to switch to bootstrapping in order to pay our bills (want a website? Or a browser add-on? We actually build pretty good ones..), in the hope that if we hang in there we’ll finally turn our often appreciated and occasionally acclaimed free (and eventually, freemium) products, with well over 3m downloads between them now (did I mention we have the 21st most popular Safari Addon according to extensions.apple.com?), into a sustainable business, which sometimes I feel ought to be inevitable, but for some reason I keep on inventing and innovating away on new ideas in private rather than doubling down and delivering on our existing products in public, and that really does have to change.

So I hope I’ll be back to blogging more often sometime soon, and with some worthwhile changes to announce. I think know we’ve got some serious potential, and despite the moderate irony you might have detected in my use of the words “hope” and “change”, I nevertheless still have hope that we, and for that matter the much maligned Obama Administration, can deliver you up some sustainable and successful innovation in the years to come, despite the obscure, and occasionally more obvious obstacles we all too often face, often of my own making, that are usually of not much interest to anyone, but real enough for us.

Er, ok, if you’ll bear with me, before I damn them with feint praise, I feel I should point out that the Obama Administration probably have more hidden accomplishments than you might have previously imagined, but with a congress that finds some way to block almost their every move, and in a media environment where the majority of viewer attention still goes to the “news” station that is somehow still saluting, and in some cases, even employing, the has-been salespeople for arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster of all time, you know, that one with projected costs of well over 3 trillion at this point, which, of course, turned out to be cheaper than their colossal failures on the domestic policy front (you know, the ones that have led to people occupying Wall St lately) – I think you all know what “news” channel I’m referring to here – is currently casting considerable doubts on the merits of the latest implementation of the Obama doctrine, you know, that multilateral mission that cost no American lives, didn’t require torturing anyone at all, created no new reasons for masses of Middle Eastern people to turn into potential terrorists (at least, that I’m aware of), has cost well under a thousandth of the price of another Iraq style operation, and arguably delivered more hope for the Libyan people than the Iraqis ever got from Team Bush, well, you’d have to say any hope team Obama might have had for an appropriate level of appreciation in next year’s elections must now be somewhere between modest, and minuscule. Which is unfortunate, in my opinion, anyway.

They’ll keep on trying I’m sure. And so will I. Double down. Deliver. I’ll do my best.

Just finally, let me point out that, by contrast, Karl always delivers, and generally in double quick time. If you need some great HTML5 work done fast, or a brilliant browser add-on that more than lives up to your expectations, well, his time is currently available and at a very fair price – at least until I finally figure out the 500 other things you need to make a successful start-up function properly – starting with focus, focus, focus.

Well, if you’ve made it this far you deserve more than a penny for you thoughts, and although I can’t promise to pay you back immediately, I’d be very eager to hear them.

As I mentioned, Lazarus is now a Mozilla recommended add-on. That seemed to be good for about 3,000 downloads a day last month. But on Sunday night I glanced at our stats and noticed we’d had 10,000 downloads. Gosh.

Provisionally, I am inclined to blame this tweet, which eventuated shortly after this post. Cheers Fred.

I expected the download rate to tail off after that. However, it’s actually steadily increasing, thanks to a spate of retweets and blog posts from people like Rick Broida, who is syndicated all over the place. We might clock over 100,000 installs for the week at this rate. That would put Lazarus in the the top 20 Firefox addons, maybe even top 10. Unfortunately I can’t tell right now because the AMO stats are broken – the last 5 days of traffic haven’t been processed for some reason. So everyone’s weekly numbers are currently way off. That may be fixed by the time you read this post, of course.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my advisors about whether we should be focused on Lazarus or Interclue. I argued that Interclue had better long term monetization prospects, and showed them my marvelous J-curves. Nat pointed out that Lazarus had the more obvious value proposition and some incredible user feedback. I threw a few ideas into the ring on how we could extend and monetize Lazarus, and it was mooted that it would be best to get at least one of those ideas into action before we started to actively promote it. However, it appears that active promotion wasn’t exactly required in this case. We appear to have entered a cycle where every time someone complains in a tweet, on a forum, or in their blog that they just lost a pile of text they typed in, someone else chimes in and says “Got Firefox? Get Lazarus.” or words to that effect. Hence we have some pretty impressive word of mouse going on right now.

[UPDATE: It appears there was a bit of a stats glitch! We were never getting more than ~5k installs / day for Lazarus. However, ~5k/day is still very impressive and a considerable boost over what we were getting before that]

Some good news. Lazarus Form Recovery, our little side project, has risen through the ranks and joined Interclue on the AMO “recommended list” – probably the highest accolade available in the world of browser add-ons, apart from perhaps a glowing review in the Mossberg column, as our colleagues at Surf Canyon recently achieved.

The AMO directory (addons.mozilla.org) is linked directly from the Firefox Tools|Add-ons menu, and add-ons from the recommended list are even featured within the browser itself, so the 30-40 add-ons on that list do get a lot of exposure, and having two in there at once really is a great honor, given how many they have to choose from.

I’ve been asked a few times how we managed it. The short version is in both cases I wrote to Mozilla and explained how our addon met their criteria for recommendation, which you can read at the bottom of this page, and not long after that they were recommended. So it’s really about having the right sort of add-on and the right sort of reviews, rather than doing much in the way of lobbying or cajoling.

Most of the credit goes to Karl, who put a lot of effort into making Lazarus almost flawless. My only significant contributions were the original concept, a few innovative implementation ideas (eg asymmetric encryption to get around having to enter a password), and letting him avoid our Interclue todo list for a month or three. It took a while longer to get Lazarus right than we expected, there are a bunch of edge cases where form recovery is hard, but we felt it was worth chasing them all down so we could honestly say “Never lose anything you type into a web form again”.

Part of the Interclue Manifesto says “We will never stop looking for more ways to increase the value of the time people spend online.”, and certainly being able to recover hours of typing that otherwise would have been lost has increased the value of my time online, and from the ecstatic reactions we’ve gotten from Lazarus users, I’d say we haven’t strayed too far from our core mission.

Here are some snippets from Lazarus reviews on AMO:

I guess that means they like it

It’s also gotten good feedback from tech bloggers who picked up on it. Not a lot of mainstream attention so far, probably because I haven’t contacted any of them, but hopefully that will come with time. Hey Walt, about that column of yours….

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting at the 5th Christchurch “Pecha Kucha” evening, where I was invited to present 20 slides for 20 seconds each on my subject of choice. I chose “Pimping your Firefox”, and although it was a bit of a last minute effort to pull it all together, I managed a fairly good 6 minutes 40 seconds judging by audience reaction. Pretty sure I made a few Firefox converts as well, as my first 8 slides were mostly dedicated to explaining why you should be using Firefox if you’re not using it already.

The 3 big reasons I gave were (1) It’s way faster than IE (with IE8 that depends on how you measure it – but Firefox is certainly much faster for highly dynamic sites) (2) It’s the safest browser available, and (3) there are over 5000 free addons available to help you “pimp it” to the max. I also talked about Firefox being an open project and the fact that you could, in theory, fix any bugs you find yourself (I could have spent another 6:40 explaining why this almost never happens in practice, starting with the fact that unless you’re an expert, you’ll never be able to tell what is a bug in the browser vs a bug in the page markup, webserver, or network services).

My next 11 slides were mostly dedicated to the various types of Firefox add-on that are out there, and on the last one I promised to post links to all the examples I used, so here they are:

Foxtab: See all your open tabs in a coverflow like visualization.
Personas: Radically pimp the look of your browser without even needing a restart.
Foxclocks: A world-time clock in your status bar.
ReminderFox: Tasklist with alarms etc.
Trashmail: An addon that lets you use a different (disposable) email address for every website you visit (we recently redeveloped this for Ferraro Ltd in Germany)
Flagfox: Information about the web server for this webpage, starting with a country flag icon in your status bar.
Interclue: Our flagship; tells you everything you want to know about a link before you click (ok, maybe not everything, but we’re working on that).
Lazarus: Our first major side project; securely & privately auto-saves content as you type, so you’ll never lose anything you enter into a webform again.
SimSidekick: Fun animated Sim-companions for your surfing, who do whacky things when you visit various “cool” sites on the net. We redeveloped the addon version of this for Freestyle Interactive, who built the no-addon-required version for their client EA, as part of what (I suspect) is the largest game marketing campaign of all time (for the Sims 3, of course).
Firebug, every web-developer’s must-have addon.
Zotero, the academic’s add-on of choice
Adblock Plus, the addon installed by over 50 million Firefox users, strips the ads from your webpages before they even get a chance to load.

My thanks to Vanessa Coxhead from Pecha Kucha Christchurch for the invitation to present, and for helping me sort out my slides at the last minute. If you’re in Christchurch and have something you want to talk about with 20 slides for 20 seconds each, I’m sure she’d love to hear from you. If you’re somewhere else, just google “pecha kucha YourCityName” and there might be one closer to home!

Well, life’s been a bit of a roller-coaster lately. We have been averaging about 2500 Interclue installs per day in the last few months after becoming a Mozilla recommended add-on, which is about 10 times as many as we were getting before that.

On the other hand we also started getting a lot more uninstalls, mostly due to usability flaws that became obvious after we started getting users who really had no idea what they were getting before they installed – the ones who read the first paragraph of the description on addons.mozilla.org and hit “install” because if Mozilla was recommending it, so it had to be worth a go.

Obviously, you can’t please everyone, and it’s pointless to try. But we’ve been working hard to increase the general usability level of Interclue in the past few months, and also to make it fully compatible with Firefox 3 before the official launch, which happened last Tuesday.

As a result of that hard work we’re actually keeping most of our new Firefox 3 users, many of whom are installing Interclue right out of the Firefox 3 add-ons manager, with very little idea of what to expect. It’s impossible to tell how many we’re getting from the add-ons manager vs people visiting addons.mozilla.org – I’m guessing maybe about half?

Currently we’re running at ~ 6k/installs/day, after slowing to “only” 5k/day over the weekend (we always get fewer installs on the weekend). During Download Day we gained almost 13k new users, and peaked at over 1000 installs an hour.

Lots, huh? Not so many when you consider Firefox 3 itself was getting downloaded over 15,000 times per minute at one point during launch day.

The codebase that runs addons.mozilla.org (a.m.o) is called “Remora” – which isn’t entirely a fair analogy – Firefox is certainly a leviathan of a product and we’re benefiting hugely from being attached to it, but there’s a more symbiotic relationship than the one you find with real Remora. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a subsequent post.