One of the conversations I had quite a bit at the Firefox Summit was around affiliate branding and my belief that Mozilla should be doing more to allow for custom versions of Firefox for a particular brand. Brand Thunder, a company I’m working with, is publishing a case study that backs up this belief. If you don’t know what Brand Thunder does, they produce custom themes and extensions for brands. So for instance, if you love the Washington Capitals, you can install their custom browser theme for Firefox.

What Brand Thunder has determined is that after the Capitals made the Firefox theme available, the number of visitors to the Capitals website using Firefox went up, and Firefox marketshare couldn’t account for all of it.

We don’t want to give away all the facts that are found in the case study, but one that we’re proud of is we doubled the penetration of Firefox usage on the Capitals web site. OK, we’ll give Firefox its due since it saw 40% growth over that period of time (growing from 16% to 19% over the time frame analyzed). Even giving Firefox credit for a 40% lift, that still leaves 60% that looks an awful lot like Brand Thunder contribution.

So where’s the affiliate branding connection? The problem is that in order to use the Washington Capitals theme, people had to go get Firefox and install it. This step probably eliminated quite a few people. How many more Firefox users would there be if they could have simply downloaded a version of Firefox with the Washington Capitals extension and theme already installed?

I was going through some old documents from the office and found the result of a brainstorming session around Enterprise Firefox requirements. I wanted to capture this list somewhere and figured this was the best place. Note that some of these might be done and some of these might not even be clear – this was just a moment in time. It will be interesting to see what other folks think of the list. It is in no particular order.

• Security (keycards, etc.)
• MSI Packaging
• Active Directory Integration
• Perfect unattended install
• Allow entire Firefox directory to be specified
• Roaming profiles
• CCK for Thunderbird
• Store preferences in registry?
• Allow cache to be local with a remote profile
• Better ActiveX sandbox for Firefox
• Scalable deployment/management
• IEAK
• Active Directory
• Registry Editing
• Centralized Management
• Better enterprise patch deployment tools (Tivoli)
• WebDAV?
• LDAP
• Kiosk mode
• Whitelisting

What do people think? What on this list is really important?

Maybe someone has already thought of this, but it was new to me…

I was talking with Myk Melez at the Mozilla Summit and as he described for me how he manages his mail, I realized that one of the problems with mail systems today is that we treat them the same way we treat regular mail. When I receive snail mail, I go through the mail, quickly throw away the junk and then probably leave the rest in a stack on the counter where bills are forgotten or coupons expire. Basically I’m picking out the easy stuff to throw away and keeping the rest. This is how most people treat email as well. Junk mail is easy to get rid of, but a lot of stuff just sits in our inbox for no reason. What if we turned this process on its head?

Imagine an inbox where mail that you’ve read disappears from your inbox after say three days. It could be archived or deleted. The only way to keep it from disappearing is to flag it or file it after you read it. You would be forced to make a decision on mail when you receive it (or within three days) and mail you don’t really care about would simply disappear. And your inbox would only contain very new stuff or stuff you deliberately flagged.

This would probably be a fairly straightforward arrangement to setup in gmail, so I think I am going to try it. Once I empty my inbox of course .