Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains

IF the open-source software movement were an upstart political campaign, Chris Messina would be one of its community organizers — the young volunteer who decamps to New Hampshire, knocking on doors, putting up signs.

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Lonni Sue Johnson

In 2004, Mr. Messina, a 26-year-old Web entrepreneur from San Francisco, found his dream candidate in Firefox, the open-source Internet browser that is a rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Unlike the other candidate he volunteered for that year, Howard Dean, Firefox is still racking up victories. And unlike Mr. Dean, the people behind Firefox have a dilemma: what happens — and what is owed to volunteer contributors — when an open-source project starts to become successful?

Some 1,000 to 2,000 people have contributed code to Firefox, according to the Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the Firefox browser. An estimated 10,000 people act as testers for the program, and an estimated 80,000 help spread the word.

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In 2004, with the release of version 1.0, Firefox became the dream of techies like Mr. Messina. Much in the way he helped coordinate supporters for Mr. Dean online, he got behind Spread Firefox, a campaign to rally the open-source base behind the browser.

That effort culminated in a fund-raising drive to advertise Firefox in The New York Times. The ad, a double-page spread designed by Mr. Messina, ran on Dec. 16, 2004.

“It was 10,000 people, putting in like 5 bucks to — I don’t know what the highest was,” he said. “It was in the spirit of the Howard Dean campaign.”

The Firefox campaign has been very successful, according to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that directs the project.

“The best we can figure, 75 to 100 million people are using Firefox,” she said. “Those people did not get it in a box. That is 75 million decisions, somewhere around the world to put this piece of software on someone’s machine.”

According to outside estimates, Firefox has about 15 percent of the market, Internet Explorer has more than 78 percent, and Apple’s Safari a little less than 5 percent. Mozilla has 90 employees and revenue of more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing. But a windfall came in the form of a royalty contract with Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in the search bar. In the last two years, the deal has brought in more than $100 million. (Google has a similar placement with Apple’s Safari.)

So far, no one has figured out how to balance keeping an open-source or collaborative project fully financed while remaining independent and noncommercial. Wikipedia, for example, holds occasional fund-raisers, while its leaders debate if it should take steps toward some sort of sponsorship or advertising.

Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year. The foundation plans to increase its work force, and to add some engineering capability. In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, also led by Ms. Baker, mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract. (The foundation’s 2006 tax return has not yet been made public, but Ms. Baker said the Google revenue will remain about the same.)

She described the decision to align with Google as an organic one that predates the official release of Firefox. “We had Google in a beta version for a long time, so we approached them first,” she said.

Mitch Kapor, who is on the Mozilla board, said that accepting a deal with Google was a no-brainer. “Always on my mind, in all my involvement is, how is it going to be sustainable?” he said. “I am a big believer that begging is not the right business model. When it began to become clear there was a business opportunity, in monetizing search in the browser, I saw this as a great opportunity.”

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But with opportunities came changes. By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of “its arrangement and agreements,” Mr. Kapor said. (Google declined to comment for this article.)

Because transparency is one of the principles of the so-called Mozilla manifesto released in February, Mr. Kapor said, there was “some tension around getting the deal done and disclosure.”

Another complication for Mozilla, some critics say, is that it could be perceived as acting as an extension of Google. For example, they note that one of Google’s growth areas, Web-based software applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

The exact nature of Mozilla’s relationship with Google has been good fodder for bloggers. When Mr. Messina recently posted a 50-minute video of his thoughts about Firefox development, the comments included a back and forth between Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Corporation, and a commentator on the blog named Corey.

When Corey wrote that “it seems like half” of the top contributors to Mozilla “work directly for Google,” Mr. Dotzler responded harshly, dismissing the claim outright: “No one who has looked at the actual development of Firefox recently could say with a straight face that Google employees are top contributors to Mozilla.”

Finally, there is the problem of what Mozilla should do with the money, at least the portion that isn’t being reinvested in the Firefox. Throwing money around among volunteers can backfire, Ms. Baker said, though the foundation has been quietly assisting contributors who are hampered by poor equipment.

Instead, Mozilla’s solution is to put money into what Mr. Kapor calls “community purposes.” To that end, the foundation is looking for a new executive director who would focus on worthy projects, although no decisions on what constitutes a worthy project has been made. “We go out and ask,” Ms. Baker said, “and even the community is not actually clear where large amounts of money should go.”

The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need

By Yoav Ezer on May 10, 2007 at 5:54 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Why Stop Bitching When it is Therapeutic?

May 4th, 2007

Written by Pete Tan on May 4th, 2007 under Problem Solving, Attitude Adjustment.

The Real Story of JPG Magazine

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about community-building, it’s this: Do Not Lie. People are too smart and well-connected to believe a lie anymore. So, with that in mind, the story I’m about to tell is absolutely true as I experienced it.

How JPG Began

In September, 2004, Heather and I went for a walk in Buena Vista Park and started dreaming up a community project. The idea was to create a printed venue for all the awesome photographers we saw online. That afternoon I checked: jpgmag.com was available.

A couple months later, we launched the site. We used every available free web tool we could find: Flickr for community discussions, Gmail for submissions, Notifylist for the mailing list, and ultimately Lulu for printing the magazine.

We maxed out a Gmail account collecting submissions for issue 1. After it was published, my friend Paul offered to whip up a backend in PHP that allowed people to submit online. By issue 2, we were using the system he developed.

We created six issues over two years this way, each with a public call for submissions on a theme, and edited by Heather and I. Each one was a labor of love, not just for us, but for the thousands of amazing photographers who submitted their work out of a altruistic desire to participate.

Inspired by the amazing growth of the magazine, in 2006, Heather, Paul, and I began discussing what we were then calling “JPG 2.0.” We wanted to open up the publishing process to the community to let everyone help make the magazine. I came up with a spec for how it would work.

Paul and I had been doing freelance design and consulting work for a while, and had been talking about starting a design firm. We envisioned devoting four days of the week to clients, and using the fifth for our own projects. JPG was at the top of the list.

But once we looked at the spec for JPG 2.0, we realized that, if we built that tool, we could make a magazine on any topic. The opportunity we had before us was really “Magazine Publishing 2.0.” I remember sitting in Heather’s and my apartment, on our big, blue couch, asking Paul, “If you had the choice, would you rather start a design firm or a publishing company?”

For me, the answer was easy. I’d been working in and around magazines and newspapers since high school. I wanted to start a publishing company. Paul wasn’t sure. But all that changed when he met Halsey Minor.

Birth of 8020

Halsey was the founder of CNET. Paul met him through the editor of Surface Magazine, where Paul was a long-time web contractor. Halsey also had been thinking about a participation-driven magazine company. Our ideas seemed to overlap nicely.

The three of us, plus Halsey’s business partner Ron, got together for a steak dinner (I had the fish). I brought a few copies of JPG. We talked about what we’d learned doing it, and how we thought we could expand the idea to multiple magazines.

Conversations continued. A few weeks later Paul and I were in a meeting with Ron, who asked, “Which one of you would be CEO?” The obvious answer, as I saw it, was: “We haven’t discussed that yet.”

“Me,” Paul said.

Discussing it later, Paul assured me. “It’s no big deal, it just means I’ll have some extra stuff to do, but otherwise we’ll be equal partners.” I believed him.

We called the company 8020 Publishing. I suggested the name based on my experience with virtual communities, after the 80/20 ratio of lurkers to posters. Halsey invested in exchange for a percentage in the company.

After 11 years of working at other people’s startups, I was finally the cofounder of my own. It was a dream come true.

Paul and I talked about all the different magazines we’d start, but ultimately decided to begin with JPG. The brand had two years of momentum behind it and a strong community. 8020 bought JPG from Heather and I for a modest sum. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, because I was still the editor, Heather would still participate as much as she could, and I still owned it because I owned a portion of 8020.

We hired an amazing team and, over the course of the next year, we built the system the JPG 2.0 system of my dreams. We began selling subscriptions and advertisements, and distributing to bookstores. The community grew by leaps and bounds. We published four more issues in the new system (the fourth, issue 10, should come out soon). We also participated in two different gallery shows. Getting unknown photographers onto the walls of art galleries is still one of the things I’m proudest of.

Fight or Flight

Unfortunately, issue 10 will be the last one that Heather and I will have a hand in. We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.

Why? The reasons are complicated, and the purpose of this post is not to air dirty laundry - it’s just to let the community know why the founders of JPG are no longer there. We owe you that much.

In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.

Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.

We had a long meeting with Ron. I tried to compromise. I suggested we add text to the website, explaining the difference between issues 1-6 and the new issues. I wanted to embrace the truth: Tell people how we started, how we grew, and what we were now. It’s the story of how a successful, organic community begins. It’s the story of how authentic media gets made. And it has the addded benefit of being true. Compromse could not be reached.

It became clear that we could not continue to work together with this fundamental disagreement. And because he was the CEO, I was the one who would have to leave. I still own a percentage of the company, so I hope to see JPG continue to grow and prosper. Unfotunately, it will be without its founding editors.

I’m indescribably sad this happened. I invested every bit of my personal and professional capital in this. I spent three years of my life working on JPG. I traveled the world to promote JPG and 8020. I hired my friends and designed the system. I managed the community and we built 10 amazing issues together. I’m very proud of what we made.

What I Learned

If it’s any help to other entrepreneurs, here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: “Someone’s gotta call quittin’ time.”
2. Communication between partners is mandatory. And you cannot communicate with someone who is not communicating with you.
3. Decisions aren’t decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
4. When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
5. Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, “You don’t want that,” what they really mean is, “I don’t want you to have that.”
6. Don’t stay where you’re not wanted, respected, or happy. Even if it’s your company.

Ever Forward

I chose to tell this story because I wanted the community I spent three years growing to know that I didn’t leave on a whim. As sad and embarrasing as it is to tell, I put the truth out there because my personal and professional credibility is on the line.

To my friends and colleagues who supported JPG over the years, thank you. You made JPG a wonderful magazine and community. And to the people I hired at 8020, I miss you terribly. This was not your fault.

And to the members of JPG community, thank you for all of your amazing work. I want you to know that I tried to work through a tough situation with honesty and integrity. And, in the end, I left because I could no longer create the kind of authentic media we set out to make together.

I hope that the next venture I start is lucky enough to have participation from people with the same enthusiasm, talent, and genuine awesomeness.

Until then,

– Derek

George and Richard

by Charley Reese
by Charley Reese

        
DIGG THIS

President George Bush's claims about what will happen if we pull out of Iraq is almost word-for-word identical to Richard Nixon's speech explaining why we must not pull out of Vietnam.

A "precipitate withdrawal" would result in a bloodbath, destabilization of Southeast Asia, would embolden our enemies and result in more war not less, Nixon said. And that is what Bush is saying, if you substitute "Middle East" for "Southeast Asia."

Nixon succeeded not in winning the war in Vietnam, but in prolonging it until 21,000 more young Americans died in the jungles and rice paddies. Then we withdrew, and none of Nixon's predictions came true.

To draw a further parallel, we got into the Vietnam War because the people who put us there: (1) didn't know the history; (2) didn't speak the language; (3) didn't understand the culture; and (4) arrogantly assumed that American firepower and technology could overcome any and all obstacles.

The Vietnamese were able to defeat us, despite our superiority in firepower and technology, because it was their country and we were foreign invaders. The people were on their side, not ours. They knew they could wear us down. They were willing to lose millions of people, and we weren't.

The current president, who really does seem to occupy a state of denial, has always refused to accept the fact that most of the opposition to our occupation of Iraq is simply Iraqis who don't want foreigners occupying their country. He has always tried to blame the resistance on outsiders – al-Qaeda or Iran or Syria. There are some outsiders in Iraq, but they wouldn't survive two days if it were not for the American occupation.

The question Congress hasn't asked about the president's so-called new strategy of spreading American troops all around Baghdad is, What's going to happen when they leave, as they inevitably will? The president's strategy is based on the assumption that if we can dampen the violence, Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds will embrace and form one united, secular government.

That is a foolish assumption. Shi'ites were dumped on every day of every year since British and French politicians created Iraq out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. This is the first time ever they have held the reins of power. They are not going to give them up or even really share them with the Sunnis. The Kurds are interested in an independent Kurdistan and don't particularly like Arabs anyway. Iran will help the Shi'ites, and the Saudis will send money to the Sunnis.

Whether we leave or stay, the fighting will go on until one faction or another attains dominance. That means there will be no democracy in Iraq. And President Bush is wrong when he claims that all people desire freedom. They first desire survival and security.

So President Bush will accomplish the same thing Richard Nixon accomplished. He will get more Americans killed, and eventually we will pull out of Iraq. It's not just the casualties that will drive us out; it is the enormous expense, the wear and tear on the Army, the necessary neglect of important domestic problems, and the political divisions at home, which will only grow more exacerbated.

Our present emperor has no clothes. If the American people want to survive with some prosperity and sense of security, they'd better find a new emperor who at least has the brains and intellectual curiosity to play the Great Game on the international chessboard. So far, the wannabe emperors don't show much promise.

April 28, 2007

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
 

 But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included he belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.
 

 When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

 I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.
 

 Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
 

 Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.
 

 Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.

 Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.
 

 You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.

 Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him asHis chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

 There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever' . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.
 

 That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

 You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
 

 That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
 

Return to the Bertrand Russell Society Home Page.

How Hot Is the New Firefox Browser?

David Garrett, newsfactor.com Wed Oct 18, 11:48 AM ET

The Mozilla Foundation, a spin-off of former Internet heavyweight Netscape, has released what many believe will be the final version Firefox 2.0, the chief competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The version, called RC3 -- short for Release Candidate 3 -- sports several user-friendly features, including a sleeker interface with buttons that glow when a user positions the mouse over them.

But far more important are the new version's security features.

"Within the browser, managing security, managing phishing, managing trust is a huge issue," said Gartner's Charles Abrams, a specialist in current and next-generation Web strategies.

Security Forefront

Chief among the new version's improved security is antiphishing protection, which steers users away from malicious Web sites by checking them against a database of known phishing scams.

Firefox updates the database when a user goes online, much the same way that most antivirus applications regularly update their databases of known virus attacks.

Other features in the new version of Firefox include souped-up search tools that suggest search terms as users type, better tabbed browsing, and a revamped method of handling Web sites with JavaScript.

The new version also gives users a wider array of ways to read RSS feeds, which are growing in popularity as more companies turn to blogging as a way to build their brands and improve market share.

Who's Winning?

Conventional wisdom indicates that Microsoft long ago won the browser wars, leaving other browsers all but dead and buried. But a seemingly endless stream of security problems and the near constant need to patch Internet Explorer, now in version 6, have left many netizens cold on Microsoft's browser.

Recent research from Net Applications, a company that monitors global Web browser usage, shows that Firefox now has 12.5 percent of the browser market and is slowly but steadily gaining ground.

In the end, Abrams said, Microsoft has the upper hand and will keep it when it releases the much-anticipated version 7 of Internet Explorer. "I still think Internet Explorer, because of the Microsoft base, is going to be the established leader," he said.

He also said that Web browsers will be one of the key battlegrounds in the future of an evolving and complex set of Internet trends. "We have to view the emergent browser wars as not only places to find information," he said, but as "something that can handle trust and identity" as users are jumping around different sites.

The result? The key feature of future Web browsers might be how they handle users' personal data, and not merely the information they pull from billions of Web sites the world over.

木兰词

作者: 纳兰性德

拟古决绝词谏友。

人生若只如初见，何事秋风悲画扇。等闲变却故人心，却道故人心易变。 　　骊山语罢清宵半，泪雨霖铃终不怨。何如薄幸锦衣郎，比翼连枝当日愿。

【赏析】 　　无疑，该阙词章与白氏《长恨歌》皆涉及唐玄宗和杨玉环那段毁誉参半的爱情故事。 　　站在政治的角度，李隆基荒淫废国。 　　从感情的意义上来看，虽然唐玄宗迫于三军众怒，无奈将杨贵妃赐死马嵬坡，从此生死诀别、阴阳永隔，唐玄宗却始终信守当初七夕夜半“在天愿作比翼鸟，在地愿为连理枝”的誓言，纵“天长地久有时尽”，“此恨绵绵无绝期”，这种用情深远的爱情故事，试问谁人不动容？ 　　当然，我们已无法考证这段真挚爱情故事是否属实，权且和纳兰一样，首先肯定这段风流佳话。 　 　　纳兰此词以一失恋女子的口吻谴责负心的锦衣郎。 　　起句非常新奇，本来两情相悦，恨不能朝朝暮暮，然而如若知道迟早分离，倒不如保持“初见”时那种若即若离的美好。 　　然后描绘变心的人往往指责满怀痴情却无端被弃的一方首先变心，失恋女子的爱恨情殇可见一斑。 　　最后引用七夕长生殿的典故，谴责薄情郎虽然当日也曾订下海誓山盟，如今却背情弃义！

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

A speech at ETech, April, 2003

Published July 1, 2003 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list.
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This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003

Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."

In particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software. Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.

Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast. It's interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation. If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.

Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.

Now, there's a large body of literature saying "We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we've gone and documented these behaviors." Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.

This talk is in three parts. The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.

The second part is: Why now? What's going on now that makes this worth thinking about? I think we're seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that's really interesting.

And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.

Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?

So, Part One. The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called "Experiences in Groups," written in the middle of the last century.

Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.

There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?

He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer. To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: "Hopelessly committed to both."

He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what's going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.

In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the same time. So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this kind of emotive group experience.

Now, it's pretty easy to see how groups of people who have formal memberships, groups that have been labeled and named like "I am a member of such-and-such a guild in a massively multi-player online role-playing game," it's easy to see how you would have some kind of group cohesion there. But Bion's thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect. So I want to illustrate this with a story, and to illustrate the illustration, I'll use a story from your life. Because even if I don't know you, I know what I'm about to describe has happened to you.

You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else. I'd rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren't here." Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave. You make a decision "I don't like this." If you were in a bookstore and you said "I'm done," you'd walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said "This is boring," you'd walk out.

You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups. It's obvious that there are no groups without members. But what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?

So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.

The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off." And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members.

You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well. Not necessarily overt. But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion. That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.

The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."

Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.

Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text.

So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.

He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that's shown up on the network over and over again -- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes. This was launched when people didn't own computers, institutions owned computers.

Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."

But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.

Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.

What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.

Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."

Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn't been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.

This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

There's a great document called "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction," which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis's Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world. And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced "We've gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening. Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues. We're not going to get involved in any of that social stuff."

And then, I think about 18 months later -- I don't remember the exact gap of time -- they come back. The wizards come back, extremely cranky. And they say: "What we have learned from you whining users is that we can't do what we said we would do. We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.

"So we're back, and we're taking wizardly fiat back, and we're going to do things to run the system. We are effectively setting ourselves up as a government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the place was falling apart."

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

Part Two: Why now?

If these things I'm saying have happened so often before, have been happening and been documented and we've got psychologica