Wired.com writer Michael Calore reports, "Any research institution that needs usability data can draft a request to query the hive mind of worldwide Firefox users. Tests can be conducted in a matter of hours with virtually no overhead — a dream compared to the hours and days spend recruiting, screening and testing participants in traditional usability studies."

What exactly does Mozilla hope to find out with this? Things like: how many tabs users have open at a time in Firefox, how often the stop button is pushed, how often do people open new tabs for searches, etc. The possibilities are endless, and in the end could prove very useful for third parties.

Here’s the rundown of exactly how it works according to Mozilla itself:

- We develop and promote a formal Test Pilot program with a Firefox add-on at its core.

– Anonymized aggregate results and analysis will then be posted automatically to the Test Pilot site.
   
– All participants will receive a “flight badge” displayed in their Test Pilot profile and available to embed on blogs, social networks, etc.

Mozilla stresses that the project is not for general market research though, and is specifically for usability and feature research. Usability is a too-often-overlooked aspect of web development and design, and I think webmasters could really benefit from this type of thing. It certainly seems worth keeping an eye on Mozilla’s results at the very least.

Google has a weakness when it comes to keeping new products a secret. According to Garett Rogers, Google uses volunteers to do much of its foreign translation–they provide them when a sentence or two and the volunteers provide the translation. While Google gets all of their translation needs fullfilled for less than minimum-wage, it can make it hard to keep new products a secret.

Rogers first provided us with a screenshot that suggests a new interface for Gmail might be forthcoming.

Next, Rogers did some additional digging and found more translation screenshots that suggest one of Gmail’s new features will be the much-desired “offline” capability.

Note: Google Gears is the tool that currently allows you to view your RSS Feeds offline.

Other new features include account use logging–so you can confirm who used your account and when.

As a Google Apps user, I’m glad to see Google might soon offer an offline version of Gmail. It’s interesting to note that this comes just days after Yahoo announced their acquisition of Zimbra and Mozilla revealed their plans for Thunderbird. It seems Google becomes highly motivated whenever there’s news from a competitor’s product.

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At the heart of MailCo’s work lays Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email client. The product has not been susceptible to the vulnerabilities that have befallen its well-known competitor, Microsoft Outlook. Thunderbird is also freely available.

“Innovating in mail and communications advances our vision of choice across the spectrum of Internet software,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair, Mozilla Foundation. “David has been a respected member of the Mozilla community for many years and we’re excited that he is joining Mozilla to lead this important effort.”

We hope some of that innovation will include the implementation of an effective calendar within Thunderbird. Calendar functionality has been a lone bright spot for Outlook, and makes it tough for anyone with an active schedule to leave behind for Mozilla’s option.

Mozilla said Thunderbird’s millions of current members need not worry about the product. They plan to continue security and stability updates as they have always done for Thunderbird users.

What is URLFan?

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo! page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird email/RSS client.

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I ran some blogs through the engine.

Problogger
Ranks 150 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 927 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 1543 posts.

Shoemoney
Ranks 1036 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 219 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 387 posts.

JohnChow
Ranks 1170 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 200 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 341 posts.

TopRankBlog
Ranks 1680 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 146 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 254 posts.

ConversionRater
Ranks 8265 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 40 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 68 posts.

AffiliateTip
Ranks 8438 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 40 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 64 posts.

WhoIsAndrewWee.com
Ranks 12688 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 28 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 31 posts.

Jim Kukral
26190 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 15 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 17 posts.

PepperJamBlog
Ranks 27113 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 18 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 21 posts.

So does it mean that a “low” ranking on the URLFan scale means your site is “bad”?

That’s hardly the case.

Remember URLFan is primarily using RSS as the metric.

If you’re not actively promoting your RSS feed, or pushing traffic into your list (like I do), then you’ll score lower.

And remember too, that traffic quantity is not the entire picture.

Traffic quality (the type of visitor you are attracting) is as and could be more important.

I’d rather than 1,000 relevant and targeted visitors to my site, rather than 10,000 untargeted ones (who might come once and never come back).

When planning your online marketing strategy, always look at the big picture.

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Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Takes Off

Plenty of new features have arrived from the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird, their email alternative client to Microsoft Outlook. Thunderbird has received more attention as an email option due to the numerous exploits that have targeted Outlook.

The project briefly described some of those new features:

Message Tagging – Organize emails by assigning tags like

Some good points -

• I don’t really open more than about 10 tabs at max and thus the individual close button is a boon.
• I love the realtime spell check.
• The seamless integration of Feeds is another kick-ass feature. You can customize it to your choice of application to handle the Feeds. For instance, I’ve defaulted it to Newsgator Online which syncs with NetNewsWire for the Mac and FeedDemon for Windows.

Mozilla

• Visit the official Firefox/Thunderbird site
• Firefox Add-ons
• Mozilla’s own favorite and Recommended Add-ons for Firefox 2.0

Firefox 2.0 Reviews

• Read/Write Web

References

• Read Moving the Internet Forward from Mitchell Baker
• Interview With Chris Beard, Mozilla VP Products
• Firefox 2.0 Release Notes
• Oinam’s list of Firefox Add-ons (This will be updated regularly to delete deprecated ones and put new recommended ones. This is exclusively for our team and may not be suitable to you in some circumstances.)
• The New Mozilla Recommended Add-ons List: The Winners and the Losers
• [Photo] Microsoft sends a congratulation cake to Mozilla
• Read Chris Messina’s The beginning of Web 2.0, a cold war of the web browser lurking around the corner.
• [Video] Chill out a bit at Firefox Flicks

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http://www.webpronews.com/?p=27945 Mozilla thunderbird as an email client? ]]> Anyone out there using Mozilla thunderbird as an email client?

I think I may install this on my laptop and have some fun, especially since there’s word of a new redesign of the calendar component that looks pretty slick.

The redesign is billed as The Lightning Project. More on this here.

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com

“We are now ready to do some testing of software update for both Firefox and Thunderbird,” said a Mozilla Quality blog post. “To that end, we have a page up on our new QA Community wiki that explains how to test the software update feature.”

Before making humorous Candyman references, Mozilla asks that any volunteers study the FAQ for bugs that are already known before they post them as failures.

The new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird have been said to be scheduled for launch some time next month. The new versions will eliminate the need to download big files to update them in the future.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Such is the case with Yahoo, who released an update to their desktop search utility yesterday afternoon. Yahoo’s tool now searches more file types, including the newly added support for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Users of said client can now use Yahoo’s tool to search emails and attachments received in Thunderbird.

According to the Yahoo Search Blog, besides Thunderbird, Yahoo added the following support:

1. Simplified UI and tabs: Your feedback was very helpful. Please keep your comments coming either on our message board or with our feedback form
2. Reduced download size: Most of you just need to search emails, MS Office docs, PDFs and other common filetypes. So we’ve made the initial download much faster by splitting out support for the large number of less common filetypes into a separate expansion pack. You can download the free expansion pack at any time, or YDS will let you know when you’ve encountered a filetype that requires it.

   (NOTE: if you had version 1.0 or 1.1 of YDS, you will still need to install the expansion pack even though the older versions included all the filetype support. Sorry for the inconvenience this time, but we’ll find a way to make this unnecessary for future upgrades.)

If you are interested in downloading the newest version of Yahoo DTS tool, you can do so here.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

I wanted to see what it’d be like to use GMail on a daily basis–not using it exclusively but as a supplement to Thunderbird on my desktop.

What I’ve discovered is that GMail is rather amazing. Like Flickr, it’s on a very short list of Internet applications that are at least as good as their desktop counterparts. In the case of GMail, it’s faster and easier to use than any desktop mail application I’ve tried.

Let me say that again, to reinforce my point. GMail is really damn fast. Fater than desktop email. And the interface feels no more complicated than it needs to.

Like many habit changing attempts, it took a few weeks of forcing myself to use the service before I really started to see the light. This explains why I missed the point last August. Most of the buzz and chatter was about the size (1GB at the time), and that turns out not to be the big deal.

Does this mean I’m switching to GMail and away from Thunderbird? No. At least not yet. But it means that GMail is now on equal footing with Thunderbird. When I need to find an old message or check mail quickly, there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll try GMail.

I hinted at changes to my email behavior when I wrote about Winning the Inbox Battle in Thunderbird. It just so happens that my new style email habits work exceptionally well in GMail too.

The more I use GMail, the more I find myself re-thinking about the question: Where will you store your data?. I’m becoming more and more comfortable with it living on servers–mine and Google’s in this case.

It’ll be really interesting to see if that 50/50 ratio changes over the next few years, especially as wireless Internet access becomes all the more common. At this point, I’m not willing to bet either way. How about you?

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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.