Where will we find the millions of Firefox users in Latin America? Photo by Ricardo Pontes

At MozCamp the other week, Winston Bowden and I hosted a workshop for improving our user engagement programs in Latin America. There are already millions of Firefox users in that area, but there is potential for many millions more to discover and use Firefox.

As a group we brainstormed ways to talk to new users and reach them. Chelsea Novak will then help put together a regional toolkit for Latin America. Such a toolkit will provide the information and resources to reach people and tell them about Firefox. And we’ll be sharing the initial toolkit in the coming weeks.

Many ideas for finding new Firefox users

The 25 Mozillians in our workshop had lots of ideas. A full list of responses and ideas are in this etherpad. We also discussed important Latin American events for our content calendar and ways to adapt our social media strategy for the region.

If you’re interested in contributing to the regional toolkit or just giving feedback, send a note to the user engagement mailing list.

How do you think we can reach new Firefox users in Latin America? Leave a comment below.

Today is an important day for Bay Area residents. It’s the Giants’ first home game of the season. With the season in full swing, there’s a question on everybody’s mind each day: Is there a Giants game today?

Fans want to know. Anyone taking public transit definitely wants to know.

So my friend and I created a simple app: Is there a Giants game today?

First home game of the season

It’s our first website side project, and it was fun to create. Check out Laura’s post for the background story. I’ll cover the technical aspects and what we learned.

We worked on it bit by bit, starting with static content and then added the ability for the site to update each day with game information. The code is on GitHub too – fork it and play with it.

What we learned

Keep it simple. Content is minimal. We just answer the question and provide information about today’s game or the next game. No fancy graphics, design or features.

It’s okay to start with a base. There are several Mozilla sites similar to ours that answer a simple question: Are we fast/mobile/pretty/slim/small/first yet? We used their layout and code as a base to get our page working as quickly as possible.

JSON for data storage. Instead of storing the Giants’ schedule in a database, we placed it in a JSON file. This allows all logic to be handled client-side and should make it easier to add offline support later.

JavaScript and jQuery for basic functionality. The page uses jQuery to access the schedule and fill in the content after the page loads. We also learned how to manipulate JavaScript Date objects to find the appropriate game information and format the date for upcoming games.

What’s next?

Improved layout across devices. We’re planning to use LESS so that the page will adapt to various screen sizes. Right now the page looks okay on different devices, but it should be easy to make it even better.

Offline support. Since people don’t always have a data connection on the go, we should make the app work offline too.

hCalendar support. We can use the hCalendar microformat to allow users to always have the next Giants in their favorite calendar app.

Have an idea for making the site better? Submit a pull request or leave a comment.

stickers, swag, rockets!

The other week I joined a number of Mozillians and web makers for a Hack Day in New York City. What’s a Hack Day?

The intention is to host a day of talks, hacks and demos that first introduces the participants to Mozilla and our various open web projects, then invite attendees to shift into participant mode and start hacking.

Sounds fun, right? A day of learning and hacking with others who like like to make things on the web.

My Hack Day experience

I was delighted to participate while visiting New York. As a hobbyist web maker, I found the talks and collaborative hacking very helpful. While there’s lots of great documentation for web developers, nothing beats talking to people and sharing ideas. I’m currently working on a simple web app for people in the Bay Area, and I was able to get advice from experts on some implementation challenges I’d hit with offline support. Plus, there was time at the end of the Hack Day to see what everyone created and get to know each other better.

What’s next?

This was the first ever MDN Hack Day, and there are several more being planned for later this year. The next one will be in Buenos Aires on April 20, and you should participate if you are in the area (it’s free!). Future Hack Days will be announced on Mozilla Hacks.

This year I’m going, and I’m ecstatic about my first SXSW Interactive. After digesting the massive schedule and reading several guides (my favorite is Brad King’s Nerdpocalypse guide), I have a basic plan. My goal is to meet lots of people and get ideas for making Firefox social media even better. There are a few talks and events I definitely want to attend, and the rest I’ll figure out as I go (mind like water).

Are you going to SXSW? @dailycavalier me on Twitter and let’s meet up.

SXSW veterans, what are your tips for surviving?

For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important. -Gary Whitman

The Two Things about Mozilla

1. Create products (such as Firefox, Marketplace, Persona, B2G) that disrupt controlled platforms in order to build a better Web
2. Develop projects in an open way that allows contributors from all over the world to participate and work towards the mission of keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands [from About Mozilla]

The Two Things about Engagement

1. Create authentic relationships with all stakeholders
2. Each type of stakeholder has different needs

The Two Things about User Engagement

1. Develop genuine relationships with users that provide 2-way value
2. Surprise and delight users often

The Two Things about Social Media

1. Share your story with fans – they’re listening
2. Listen to users and support them – they have stories to share too and need your help sometimes

What do you think are The Two Things about Mozilla? What are The Two Things about areas where you contribute?

How did we increase the amount of content we published from a few dozen posts a year to over 300? Sure, we could have only shared news and updates about Firefox as a product, but we found our users resonated better with a balance of 3 different types of content. As Jane mentioned in her post:

Our content is split pretty evenly between being (i) informative about Firefox as a product and sharing the latest news, (ii) offering helpful advice and tips on how to make the most of Firefox, and (iii) most importantly balanced with fun, engaging and inspiring engagement activities.

As 2012 kicks off, we’ll continue to nurture relationships more than ever. Mozilla is an organization about people building a better Web. Our millions of friends support that cause and are actively engaged with us. Those friends have made the Mozilla project  successful, and they will continue to help us in making the Web better. Our New Years resolution is to continue innovating on your behalf and keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands. And nurturing relationships is a key part of that.

2011 in social by the numbers

• 6.5 million Firefox fans on Facebook
• 640,000 @Firefox followers on Twitter
• 45-50% of Facebook fans engaging with us each month
• In March, Firefox 4 spread around world through two social campaigns that were shared by hundreds of thousands of users
• Over 300,000 Facebook shares (likes, comments, shares) in the last 3 months alone
• Some Facebook posts were localized into as many as 15 language
• Celebrated 7 years of Firefox by bringing cuteness to the world with Firefox Live with 4.5 million video plays and 200,000 hours of cuteness watched

Today, we are excited to join together as a global community to celebrate the 7th birthday of Firefox. As the only independent browser with a mission to make the Web better, we are proud of how the last seven years of Firefox have pushed the Web forward:

• The latest release of Firefox is more than 32 times faster than Firefox 1.0.
• We recently shifted to a new release cycle to deliver features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster.
• Leading edge HTML5 support in Firefox ensures that developers can create beautiful and exciting Web experiences for users.
• Favorite features like tabbed browsing, built-in phishing and malware protection, the Awesome Bar, Do Not Track and our gallery of thousands of  Firefox add-ons give millions of users around the world more choice and control over their Web browsing experience.

To celebrate, Mozilla has once again adopted firefox (a.k.a red panda) cubs at the Knoxville Zoo. For the next few months, you can watch these baby firefoxes play, live and grow via a 24 hour live video stream at Firefox Live. Please help spread the word by sharing the cuteness of our newest Mozillians at Firefox Live.

Just as Firefox is localized in over 80 languages, imagine if our Facebook page or Twitter presence was available in 80 languages as well. And what if users could have conversations with other users and Mozilla contributors on those social networks as well? That would be quite a rich experience, and I think it’s an experience we should strive to offer for our 5 million+ users on those networks.

Studies have shown that localized content on these channels offers an experience for users that is several times more engaging. The exciting bit is that we’ve already localized some of our content on our social channels, and it’s proven to be quite successful in engaging our users. We currently localize announcements for Firefox updates and new campaigns, and we also localize our custom tabs on Facebook when possible.

We can improve on this by creating an easy way to offer localized versions of almost all our content on these pages. We could start with a few locales as a trial. We’d create solid experiences and have conversations with those users that is just as compelling as our English content. If successful, we could then add more locales.

What is your favorite way that Firefox content is localized (besides in the product itself)? What organizations or brands have you seen localized content for that have impressed you? Add your thoughts in the comments.

I was recently inspired by the webdev team’s activity at Open Source Bridge the other week, where hackers were asked what they want the Web to be. Dozens of people used posters, letter stencils, and markers to create their answer and show the possibilities open to us because of technology. The beautiful result can be seen in their video and Mike Morgan’s photo gallery, which is appropriately named Your Web.

Everyone uses and thinks about the Web differently, and we all have the opportunity to be part of the Web and choose how it evolves. So let’s show our users that. As part of a campaign for existing Firefox users, I’d like to see the activity from Open Source Bridge grow to a new scale in a way that any Firefox user can participate. The concept should be solid, the user’s interaction should be simple, and the gallery should be visually compelling (with some HTML5 + CSS3 love, naturally).

The Concept

Let’s create a fun and interactive way for users to think about the Web and tie that back to Mozilla’s mission and why we create products like Firefox. Let’s ask users a simple question about the Web and showcase their responses. Questions like “What do you love about the Web?” and “What do you want the Web to be?” can be answered in a single word or phrase. It should be a broad enough question that anyone can answer it easily.

The Interaction

Show users how others have answered the question and then ask them for their response. To make the response even richer and provide a human element, we encourage users to write their response on a poster and upload a picture of them holding the poster, similar to the Your Web gallery. A user can also tag their response to show how they use the Web (eg: an Artist, Developer, Student, or Writer).

The Gallery

Once a user submits their response (the photo is optional, by the way), they see their answer appear in the gallery, along with responses from similar users based on their locale and tag. The gallery could show a word and photo cloud where the more popular responses are larger. One could then share their response by email or on a social network. Here’s a rough sketch of how it could look, courtesy of Crystal Beasley:

Sketch of the main page

Sketch of the submission form

Localization

I’m excited to see how users around the world think about the Web and answer the question, but many of those responses will be in different languages — languages I don’t speak. Unlike other campaigns where we localize content before the campaign launches, most of the content for this campaign will be submitted by users. This gives us an interesting opportunity to have our multilingual users translate responses so that others can understand how people around the world answer the question.

For example, a German user could offer a translation for a French response, and then German users could view that translation when they mouse over it. And we could do this in a way that still gives our localization community the ability to review translations before they appear for other users.

Another fascinating question is how do we structure the responses across different locales so the answers are brief but still descriptive? We could limit user submitted answers to a certain number of words or characters. In English, that limit could be pretty low — perhaps 4 words up to 30 characters total. We could probably establish a rule for each locale as to how long answers can be. What would make sense for other locales? For your locale?

Feedback

I’m teaming up with Winston Bowden to put this together (here’s the wiki page), and I’d love feedback on how to tweak this idea and make it even better. I would especially like to see your thoughts on the localization aspects.

Firefox 4 announcement for German users

And we’ve already started the past couple of months with some localized status updates on the Mozilla Firefox page and in our custom tabs. The status update announcing Firefox 4 was posted in 19 languages. Plus, our Firefox 4 tab is localized and soon our Web Hero tab will be as well.

Web Hero tab in French

Just how global are our users on Facebook? Here are the numbers Facebook provides us:

Top languages

Top countries

We’re continuously thinking about providing content which is even better tailored to Facebook users in different regions of the world who don’t speak English as their first language. Do you know any organizations or brands that have localized Facebook content? Add your favorite to the comments or add your own ideas for localizing content.