Yesterday Digg decided to launch their first Firefox 3 extension, and being a Firefox extension developer myself one of the first things I noticed was the preferential treatment they apparently received. Before I get into that let’s take a look at their well-designed extension.
The top toolbar aspect of the extension is nothing new as we’ve already seen other extensions offer similar functionality. Basically the toolbar provides a quick glance at how many Diggs and comments the page you’re currently visiting has.
The real power, however, comes from the notification system that it includes. When a new story is posted you’ll see a popup notification window in “near real-time.” Similarly you can also receive notifications for when your friends post new articles. Here’s an explanation by Kevin Rose on how it all works:
My only pet peeve is that when I click the “Digg It” button I shouldn’t be taken to the Digg page. The action should happen instantaneously without the Digg site having to load. If I wanted to go to the Digg page I’d just click the link for the comments.
–Eliminating the Need for the Digg Toolbar–
I don’t need another toolbar in my browser, and I’m sure that will be addressed in a future version of the extension. There’s an easy work around though. Go to View -> Toolbars -> Customize, and drag any of the objects from the Digg toolbar onto another toolbar. Here’s what it looks like when I dragged the two primary items up onto the Menu bar:
I don’t recommend dragging the Digg menu item from the Digg toolbar up there, otherwise it will stretch out the images a lot on those buttons. They still get a little stretched out, but it’s not as bad as it would be if you dragged that button up to the top.
–Digg is “Above” Other Firefox Developers–
There’s just one thing that I, as a Firefox extension developer myself, find a bit frustrating. Digg is apparently being given special treatment on the Mozilla Add-ons site considering that their extension has been out less than 3-days, and it is no longer experimental. Extension editors/moderators are supposed to examine user reviews to determine whether an add-on should make it out of the Sandbox. Interestingly enough the Digg extension was made publicly available before they even had a single review.
Yet our extension, CyberSearch, has 47 reviews (thanks everyone!) than theirs and it is still stuck in the Sandbox after over a month. I know the editors are overloaded, but I think they need to keep a fair playing field. Stuff like this is pretty discouraging for developers.
Digg is a big company. Perhaps Mozilla automatically assumed that they can be trusted. Or maybe they paid to get into the fast lane.
Dude,
As a long time reader I really feel the need to be completely honest with you here. I’m getting sick of hearing you talk (and now whine) about your extension. Shouldn’t you have a separate blog or something for it so you don’t thrust your “my extension” posts on your long-time readers who are accustomed to a different fare? Stop thinking from Ryan’s POV and start thinking of Cybernet as a separate entity (I know it can’t be easy), would CN readers really want several posts covering any single firefox extension?
And since I’ve already irritated you, here’s a couple more gripes…
1) Partial feeds (all posts were full previously AFAICR), I’m sure most readers would rather have a long post load right in their reader than have to swap to their browser.
2) Mac posts (I’m sure you’ve done your homework with the site stats and it must have increased the hits, just as long as you’re aware that you’re diluting the content for your old-time fans who are predominantly Windows users) – perhaps multiple feeds like Lifehacker has could be a solution? It could also be a solution for gripe #1 above.
Please try to see only the constructive bits in my comment and forgive the abrasive tone.
Nosh, to be honest I have to say that I noticed the same thing happening. It hasn’t irritated me yet, but I can understand your POV. To my knowledge, Cybernetnews has always had partial feeds, but I really like your suggestion for separate feeds!
I’m guessing they are just assuming they can be trusted, because it would be very wrong for Mozilla to be charging for a privilege like that.
It’s easy to skip by the posts you don’t want to read, but CyberNet has and always will be “Ryan and Ashley’s POV”. I write about the things that interest me, programs I find that make me more productive, and then I share them with my readers. All of our topics aren’t going to interest everyone, but I write about what interests me. For example, if we didn’t have iPhones I’m sure we wouldn’t be writing about them as much as we do.
Until you’re in our shoes I don’t know if you’d understand why we don’t do full feeds for all of our articles. Checkout blogs like this:
dillseed.net/blog/
Look familiar? Yeah, they’re scraping every single article from our feed, and making it look like it’s theirs. There are dozens of different blogs out there doing that, and it gets frustrating to think that they can get traffic for the content we spend our time and effort writing.
Our ratio of Mac-only posts is still less than our ratio of Windows-only posts. You can grab a Windows feed here:
[cybernetnews.com]
but that will only include programs and tips that pertain to Windows. It will ignore all news articles that don’t pertain to Windows.
Nosh — I know Ryan responded, but there were a few thoughts that came to mind when I read your comment.
First, thanks for being a long-time reader, we really do appreciate it.
You mentioned partial feeds but I do want to point out that partial feeds are only for our longer articles like CyberNotes, WrapUps and any of out other long articles. The rest of our content is full-feed. Keep in mind that you read this content for free and clicking through to our site once maybe twice a day, if that, if you are keeping up with CyberNet through feeds, supports us (even if you do not click on ads) . We don’t believe that is too much to ask.
In regards to writing about our extension, Ryan explained why he was doing this in a previous article that you may not have seen. When an extension is in the Sandbox, users of that extension do not get notified when it has been updated. Because it is new and there were requests for features, there were several updates right off the bat which is why it seemed as though there were a lot of posts. Development will be at a slower pace now and you really won’t be seeing too much about it.
Us writing about CyberSearch is no different than, for example, Lifehacker writing about their Better Gmail extension when a new version is released. Of course they write a lot more posts in a days time so it doesn’t get noticed as much.
Anyhow, thanks for the feedback, we always appreciate it.
> We don’t believe that is too much to ask.
Fair enough. Have you considered ads embedded within feeds or is that not an option? It’d let readers like me (an Ad-block user) actually start supporting your site.
Unfortunately Feedburner has stopped their advertising program for now, but Google is supposed to be releasing AdSense for feeds soon. If we are able to display AdSense within our feeds, we’d definitely publish full-feeds for all of our content.
What’s wrong with a little advertising? I’m guessing that Ryan/Ashley are getting plenty of great feedback on their extension from the readers of Cybernet.
And I read the windows articles (when they interest me) even though I have Mac. Then again, software/computers is my job.
Oh, great, this is really handy. Thanks a bunch.
We definitely are, and because of that a lot of bugs have already been squashed.
Extensions are not approved based on the order they were nominated to go public. They are approved generally based on an editors interest in an extension. New extensions are particularly hard to get approved (updates are easier). I’m not surprised digg got approved quickly because they are a very popular company. I think you should get on #addons in irc.mozilla.org and ask for someone to approve your extension.
I figured it had to be based upon popularity, but I’m just surprised with as many reviews as our extension has already received that it hasn’t caught the attention of any editors.
I was thinking about getting on the IRC, but I didn’t want to pester anyone. I wasn’t sure if that was frowned upon. Thanks for the tips John!
your out of sandbox!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Did you bribe them Ryan?
Well, I did ask someone at Mozilla if they could look into it for me. But no goods, services, or money traded hands.