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Spread Firefox, often 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. 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: 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. 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. New York Times advertisement
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Firefox Party When Firefox 2.0 was released to the public, there was a Firefox party on the following weekend, where many spreadfirefox.com members would setup parties all over the world. Their locations could be found by an integration of the Google maps API. 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. 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. A parody Spread Internet Explorer site has also launched. This site posts humorous arguments "proving" that Internet Explorer is superior to competing browsers, in particular Firefox, and "you should give Microsoft all your money". Recurring jokes include calling Firefox a "communist" browser, posting nonsensical proofs claiming that Firefox "supports terrorism", and referring to other parody sites such as Uncyclopedia for "factual" information. See also | |||||||||
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