Day: October 26, 2006

Firefox 2 Gets Some Attention

/ Adam Nash

Mozilla Firefox 2 Logo

Nice post from Chad Alderson today about features he likes in Firefox 2.0.

Firefox 2 Owns

I’ve already posted about my favorite unsung feature in Firefox 2 – the ability to automatically recover all of your tabs in the case the computer or Firefox exits unexpectedly. It single-handedly saved me over 45 minutes of work one night as I was blogging.

Chad, however, has picked up on spell-check and better tab navigation as his favorite features.

I’m personally attached to Firefox because I have such close friends on Mozilla team. They have a tough problem – Firefox is clearly the front-runner and thought leader for modern browser design. Others can make significant progress through imitation – the Mozilla community has to really move in new directions to keep ahead of the pack.

Firefox really popularized tab browsing, so it’s not suprising to see that they are able to take the feature set to the next level. Enhanced navigation, session recovery are all insights you develop once you already have familiarity with tabbed browsing.

It’s very interesting to me to see which features people find useful in Firefox 2, and which features they love. I predict they’ll be separate lists. I think spell check is probably the most useful feature to date for me, but thanks to that one crash, the saved session is my favorite feature by far.

Kudos again to the Mozilla team for a great launch. If you haven’t already, go get Firefox 2!

SpotDJ Beta for iTunes is Live

/ Adam Nash

Actually, it went live about a week ago.

SpotDJ Logo

What happened today, however, is that Scott Kleper, one of the co-founders, added a blog post about SpotDJ and some of the insights from launching the product.

SpotDJ Makes iTunes Better

Not being a big music lover myself, it’s hard for me to completely see the opportunity that Scott sees here. I see that more as a blind spot in my own understanding of the “music lover” rather than any assessment of the business opportunity for SpotDJ. As I posted earlier, I do find the idea of iTunes as a demand-generation platform fascinating – the same way I find Salesforce thinking of their application as a demand-generation platform fascinating.

Being a product guy, however, I did appreciate this tidbit from Scott’s post about a feature that they built for personalization of profiles on SpotDJ:

One of the features that we launched with the beta was the “30 Second Random Interview”. As a registered DJ, you can go to your profile page and answer 3 randomly chosen questions (e.g. “What’s the most embarassing song on your iPod?”). Once you’ve answered all 3, another one shows up. So you can keep answering questions, and the results of your interview are displayed on your public DJ page for other users to see. People love this feature! We have DJ’s who have signed up and answered all 20 or so questions (including, oddly enough, “What kinds of spots do you record?”) without even recording a single spot yet! I think it shows a Web 2.0 truism — you can build web sites that are simply fun to use. We could have made SpotDJ just a download site, but by adding some social features and cool things to explore, we made it a fun site to hang out on.

I think Scott is dead on here, and you can bet that I’ll be bringing this topic up as we discuss new features for the sites that I’m responsible for. There is a really positive insight from the recent growth of Web 2.0 sites around the engagement that people find in sharing personal insights and information with others. I like the simple design that SpotDJ went with on this as well.

So, if you haven’t checked out SpotDJ yet, you should. And if you haven’t thought about how to allow users to better engage with your site and each other on your site, you should.